AFRICAN-AMERICAN ARTISTS OF LOS ANGELES:
Noah Purifoy
Interviewed by Karen Anne Mason
Completed under the auspices
of the
Oral History Program
University of California
Los Angeles
Copyright © 1992
The Regents of the University of California
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LITERARY RIGHTS AND QUOTATION
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the University Library of the University of California,
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Photograph of Noah Purifoy by Katherine P. Smith;
courtesy of Katherine P. Smith.
CONTENTS
Biographical Summary vi
Interview History viii
TAPE NUMBER: I, Side One (September 8, 1990) 1
Family background- -Absence of art in early life--
Education--Childhood interests--Military service--
Goes into social work.
TAPE NUMBER: I, Side Two (September 8, 1990) 19
Interest in psychology and existentialism- -Six
Birds --Discovering the interrelation of mind and
body- -Attitude toward religion--Father Divine.
TAPE NUMBER: II, Side One (September 8, 1990) 27
Begins career in social work--Attends Chouinard
Art Institute- -Working as a window trimmer and
furniture designer- -Begins working for the Watts
Towers Arts Center- -Interest in music--
Relationships with women- -Becomes a "Sunday
painter" --Edward Kienholz.
TAPE NUMBER: II, Side Two (September 8, 1990) 46
More on Kienholz--Confronting contradictions of
his philosophy--Niggers Ain't Never Ever Gonna Be
Nothin'--All They Want To Do Is Drink + Fuck.
TAPE NUMBER: III, Side One (September 9, 1990) 55
Gives up window trimming to work on his art--
Assemblages--Developing programs at the Watts
Towers Arts Center--The Watts riots--Leaves the
Watts Towers Arts Center.
TAPE NUMBER: IV, Side One (September 22, 1990) 71
"Arts and the Poor" conference in Gaithersburg,
Maryland--Bringing artists together for "66 Signs
of Neon" --Using found objects--Individual pieces
in "66 Signs of Neon" --Self ishness versus
cooperation .
IV
TAPE NUMBER: IV, Side Two (September 22, 1990) 90
Exhibiting "66 Signs of Neon" at various
universities--Intent of "66 Signs" --Teaching at
University of California, Santa Cruz--The Watts
Summer Festival--Challenging formalist notions of
art--Steve Kent and the Improv Theater- -Layering
pieces to achieve depth.
TAPE NUMBER: V, Side One (September 22, 1990) 107
Exploring sexuality--Symbols in his work--More on
the Watts Summer Festival--Protest art--
Impossibility of analyzing art--Working at the
Central City Community Mental Health Facility.
TAPE NUMBER: V, Side Two (September 22, 1990) 126
Programs developed at the California Arts
Council--Attempt to integrate art and education--
Returns to doing his own art.
TAPE NUMBER: VI, Side One (September 23, 1990) 138
California Arts Council's problems funding
minorities- -Community agencies that funded the
arts in the sixties--The Watts Summer Festival
and the Watts Towers Music and Arts Festival--
Reasons for the art boom of the sixties--Travels
to Nigeria for the World Black and African
Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC).
TAPE NUMBER: VI, Side Two (September 23, 1990) 157
Homes and studios in Los Angeles--Move to the
desert- -Recent artworks- -Distinction between art
he makes to exhibit and art he makes to sell.
Index 174
BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
PERSONAL HISTORY:
Bom: August 17, 1917, Snow Hill, Alabama.
Education: B.S., Education, Alabama State Teachers
College; M.S.W., Social Service Administration, Atlanta
University; B.F.A., Chouinard Art Institute.
Military Service: Carpenter's mate first class,
Seabees, United States Navy, 1942-45.
SOCIAL SERVICES EMPLOYMENT:
Industrial arts instructor, secondary schools,
Montgomery, Alabama, ca. 1939-42.
Social worker, Cuyahoga County Department of Social
Services, Cleveland, Ohio, ca. 1950-52.
Social worker, Los Angeles County Hospital, ca. 1952-54.
Director of community services. Central City Community
Mental Health Facility, Los Angeles, 1973-76.
ARTISTIC AFFILIATIONS AND ACTIVITIES:
Window trimmer, Cannel and Schaffen Interior Designs,
Los Angeles, mid-1950s.
Furniture designer, Angelus Furniture Warehouse, mid-
1950s.
Window trimmer, Broadway department stores, Los Angeles,
mid-1950s-1962.
Interior design, partnership with John Smith, Los
Angeles, late 1950s.
Founder /director. Watts Towers Arts Center, Los Angeles,
1964-66.
Cofounder, Joined for the Arts, 1966.
Cofounder /organizer. Watts Summer Festival, Los Angeles,
1966-74.
VI
Creator, "66 Signs of Neon," 1966.
Instructor, art education and demonstration workshops.
University of California, Los Angeles; University of
California, Davis; University of California, Santa Cruz;
Inunaculate Heart College, Los Angeles; Thatcher Boys
School, Ojai, California, 1966-73.
Cofounder, Company Theater, Beverly Hills, 1966.
Member, California Arts Council; chair, art in education
subcommittee, 1976-87.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS:
"The Negro in American Art: One Hundred and Fifty Years
of Afro-American Art, " University of California, Los
Angeles, 1966.
"66 Signs of Neon, " first presented in 1966 at the first
annual Watts Summer Festival and then toured to nine
universities and the Gallery of Modern Art, Washington,
D.C.
"Microcosm 69," Long Beach Museum, Long Beach,
California, 1969.
"12 Afro-American Artists," Nordness Galleries, New
York, New York, 1969.
"Niggers Ain't Never Ever Gonna Be Nothin'--All They
Want To Do Is Drink + Fuck, " Brockman Gallery, Los
Angeles, 1969.
"Benny, Bernie, Betye, Noah, and John, " Scripps College,
1971.
"Black American Artists/71," Chicago Bell Galleries,
Chicago, Illinois, 1971.
"Contemporary Black Artists of America, " Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York, New York, 1971.
"Contemporary Black Imagery: 7 Artists, " Brockman
Gallery, Los Angeles, 1971.
"The Metal Experience," Oakland Art Museum, Oakland,
California, 1971.
Vll
"Garbage Needs Recycle Exhibit, " United States Office of
Information, Berlin, 1972.
"Los Angeles 1972: A Panorama of Black Artists," Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 1972.
"Negro Art, " La Jolla Museum, San Diego, California,
1974.
"Black Artists in California," Governor's office,
Sacramento, California, 1975.
"19 Sixties: A Cultural Awakening Re-evaluated 1965-75,"
California Afro-American Museum, Los Angeles, 1989.
"Noah Purifoy: A New Place to Be, " Museum of African
American Art, Los Angeles, 1989.
PUBLICATIONS:
Junk magazine. Los Angeles: Joined for the Arts, 1967.
Contemporary Black Philosophy. Pasadena, California:
Williams and Williams Company, 1971.
Vlll
INTERVIEW HISTORY
INTERVIEWER:
Karen Anne Mason, B.A., English, Simmons College; M.A.,
Art History, University of California, Los Angeles.
TIME AND SETTING OF INTERVIEW:
Place: Purifoy's home, Joshua Tree, California.
Dates, length of sessions: September 8, 1990 (113
minutes); September 9, 1990 (44); September 22, 1990
(150); September 23, 1990 (74).
Total number of recorded hours: 6.35
Persons present during interview: Purifoy and Mason.
CONDUCT OF INTERVIEW:
This interview is one of a series on African-American
art and artists in Los Angeles. This oral history
project gathers and preserves interviews with African-
American artists who have created significant works and
others in the Los Angeles metropolitan area who have
worked to expand exhibition opportunities and public
support for African-American visual culture.
The interview is organized chronologically, beginning
with Purifoy's childhood in Alabama and continuing on
through his activities as an artist in the Los Angeles
area. Major topics covered include Purifoy's work at
the Watts Towers Arts Center, the "66 Signs of Neon"
exhibit, his work with the California Arts Council, the
role of art in education, his individual works of art,
and the philosophy of human development that has guided
his approach to the creative process.
EDITING:
Steven J. Novak, editor, edited the interview. He
checked the verbatim transcript of the interview against
the original tape recordings, edited for punctuation,
paragraphing, and spelling, and verified proper names.
Words and phrases inserted by the editor have been
bracketed.
IX
Purifoy reviewed the transcript. He verified proper
names and made minor corrections and additions.
Teresa Barnett, senior editor, prepared the table of
contents. Rebecca Stone, editorial assistant, prepared
the biographical summary and interview history. Novak
compiled the index.
SUPPORTING DOCUMENTS:
The original tape recordings of the interview are in the
university archives and are available under the
regulations governing the use of permanent noncurrent
records of the university. Records relating to the
interview are located in the office of the UCLA Oral
History Program.
TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE
SEPTEMBER 8, 1990
MASON: The first question we always ask is, when and where
were you born?
PURIFOY: A little town twenty miles from Selma [Alabama]
called Snow Hill. It was a little town of-- I don't know
how many people, but not very many. It was a farm town.
MASON: What year was that?
PURIFOY: In 1917.
MASON: Who are your parents?
PURIFOY: George [Purifoy] and —
MASON: I have Mims here.
PURIFOY: Yeah, that was my mother's maiden name.
MASON: Georgia Mims [Purifoy] . Do you know much about
each of their families, where your father's family was from
and your mother's family was from? Anything about that
background?
PURIFOY: No. Because of the French name Purifoy, I guess
the family eventually came from Louisiana, probably. But I
have no recollection of that. Nobody ever told me actually
where we came from or where my parents were born. I never
thought to ask.
MASON: When did your parents pass?
PURIFOY: My mother died around 1940, and my father died
around 1943.
MASON: What was their educational level?
PURIFOY: They were farmers, sharecroppers, as the case
was. If I can recollect well, my mother went to the eighth
grade, but my father had little or no education
whatsoever. I think my mother taught school in the
summertime in Selma. That was twenty miles, as I said,
from where I was born.
MASON: Do you have any brothers and sisters?
PURIFOY: Yeah. There were thirteen of us. I only
remember eight, two brothers and six sisters. Among the
six sisters there were twins. We were a rather close-knit
family from the time I can remember. I was looking over
some old stuff I wrote some time ago, and I started to
write my life story. I didn't get very far on it, but I
wondered if you'd be interested in me reading that into the
machine in our spare-- You know, maybe tonight or sometime.
MASON: Okay.
PURIFOY: It's rather lengthy. I would like for you to
thumb through the material and see if you think it's the
right quality for what you want. I wasn't sure.
MASON: Well, it's not just what we want. It's also what
you want or what you think is important. What you would
like the world to know about you.
PURIFOY: It's mostly about me and my relationship in the
family unit, my early childhood experiences in school and
my relationship to the community.
MASON: Well, those are some of the things that we want to
talk about today. After this first session, we can stop
and look through it and maybe if there are some other
things that you want to add we can add that in later.
[tape recorder off] You were talking about your family,
and you said that you were a pretty close family. Was
there any one or another person with whom you were
particularly close? A brother or sister? Was there any
extended family living with you, or it was just your
parents and your brothers and sisters?
PURIFOY: No, it was just immediate family. I was first
attached to the twins, but since--
KASON: You should give us their names too, as you
remember .
PURIFOY: Mary [Purifoy] and Rose [Purifoy] were their
names. And my youngest sister [Esther Purifoy], who is
younger than I am--in fact she's the last one of us--I
became attached to later more than the twins because I felt
I had to protect her, being male and all, in addition to
the fact that I had to take her to school for quite a
while.
MASON: Where did you fall within the order?
PURIFOY: I was the second to the last one. Actually, I
was the third to the last one, because I remember my mother
had one child who died. So I was the third to the last.
My kid sister was the second to the last, and the one who
died was the last one of us. That's the line in which the
eight living sisters and brothers now take place. The
others I don't quite remember, except my two brothers,
which makes ten of us, I guess. No, six sisters and myself
makes seven, and my two brothers makes nine, and the one
who died makes ten. They are the ones who I remember
best. And there was probably one other who died at the age
of eleven or twelve, which I don't recall very clearly. So
it was ten members of the family that I have recollection
of , and the other three I do not .
MASON: What about the community in Snow Hill? What was
the community like? What were the people like? What kinds
of things did you do? I'm sure you had a lot of work to do
around the farm, but also what--?
PURIFOY: Well, I was under three years old when we moved
to the city, Birmingham, Alabama. I don't remember too
much what happened in the country except picking cotton. I
trailed behind the family as they picked cotton. I got in
the way for the most part and was often sent home on a
blind mule and had to wait at the door until somebody came
to get me off. But I don't have very many recollections of
what was taking place in the country.
MASON: As a child, do you remember it as a particularly
hard life?
PURIFOY: Well, life was hard, but I had no consciousness
of that. In reflection, I can sense that we were extremely
poor, but it wasn't emphasized. It was obvious, but we
weren't denied the things that the family could afford to
provide for us. So therefore, and for many other reasons,
I had little or no knowledge of absolute poverty. I mean,
that's what we were living in, but I had little or no
knowledge of that. I recall once we moved to the city and
being three or four years old-- My mother worked for some
white folks two or three streets over from where we
lived. I remember she brought food home from the white
folks' kitchen. But my father was always working at
something or other, and he was a fairly good provider.
MASON: So you moved to the city because your father found
another job there? Or your mother? Do you remember?
PURIFOY: Well, I think it was my father and my brother
[Clarence Purifoy] who came to town first, to the city
first, and they found work and sent for us.
MASON: What other memories do you have about the time?
Because I'm just thinking that around this time the
Depression struck, in '29, and what was that like for your
family, which was already fairly poor? And also the fact
that around the thirties, the mid- thirties, during the WPA
[Works Progress Administration] , all these artists had to
get fellowships and things to go South, to places like
Alabama, because they wanted to study black folk culture or
whatever. Is there anything that you remember about so-
called folk culture in the South then or anything that you
remember that you tend to deal with in your art at all
today? Nothing really? No quilting bees or Sunday sermons
or anything like that that black folklorists usually write
about?
PURIFOY: Well, when you mention church, we were encouraged
to go to church, but we weren't required to go.
MASON: What denomination?
PURIFOY: Baptist. Oh, no, Methodist I think. Methodist,
yeah. However, my mother prayed constantly in a singsong
fashion as she went about her work. I was highly
influenced by that, although it wasn't particularly meant
for us, for me, or the children. It meant that she was a
quite religious person. I think she practiced her religion
more than the average person. That is to say, she was an
extremely kind, generous, gentle person, in direct contrast
to my father, who paid little or no attention to the
management of the family as such. It was my mother who
managed the family. I experienced a strong female
influence as a child, both having six sisters, as well as a
strong mother. So those things influenced me a great deal,
probably shaped the kind of person I ultimately became.
That's about all I remember in terms of lasting effect and
influence.
As far as art is concerned and the Depression during
the thirties, I was not in any way exposed to any art forms
of any kind. I took to the movies a great deal at the time
and worked on Saturdays to earn show fare, it was called.
But that was the extent of my artistic experience, with one
exception. My mother, I remember, went to the bank and
drew out her last penny to buy my brother a piano. I was
about, I don't know, seven or eight years old at the
time. And he learned to play by rote, I guess. I heard
some rumors that he was taught by either Ma Rainey or
someone of that ilk.
MASON: What's this brother's name?
PURIFOY: Clarence.
MASON: Do you know how he got the idea that he wanted to
play the piano?
PURIFOY: Well, he was associated in one way with Bessie
Smith, the blues singer.
MASON: Okay, they would come through- -
PURIFOY: I heard that they were in our vicinity. I'm not
certain about this. These are the names that come to
mind. Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith were associates of my
brother, who probably taught him to play piano and the
blues, as the case was. My mother sensed my brother was
problematic, in the sense that he drank a lot and he fooled
around a lot, so to speak. My mother, as a means of
keeping him home, bought this piano. Of course, when she
died it was not paid for yet, and it had to go back. This
I refer to in my notes about my childhood.
MASON: But music wasn't really, generally-- Well, you said
your mother's singing influenced you.
PURIFOY: It wasn't emphasized. It was present but not
emphasized as an art form. In no way. We weren't astute
enough to associate music with art. It was just done. My
twin sisters sang duets in the church and stuff like
that. But we just did it because it came natural- It
wasn't construed as any kind of art form or folk music or
anything of that nature.
MASON: Were there any craftsmen around?
PURIFOY: Not to my recollection. In other words, I didn't
get to the idea of doing art in my childhood. In no way.
In fact, I didn't get the idea of doing art until I got
unhappy with my work as a social worker and decided to go
to Chouinard [Art Institute] . I had given little or no
thought to it prior to that.
MASON: We'll talk about that in more detail soon. I have
that from 1939 to 1945 you were an industrial arts
instructor in Montgomery, Alabama.
PURIFOY: Nineteen what?
MASON: 'Thirty-nine to 'forty-five.
PURIFOY: Yeah, I changed college in about 1939.
MASON: Where did you go to college?
PURIFOY: Alabama State [Teachers] College in Montgomery,
Alabama. I majored in history and education. But there
were no jobs available in history or education or the
academics, for that matter. I had had an extensive
experience in high school in carpentry and woodwork, so I
was skilled enough to teach industrial arts. I never had
any basic training, except in high school. That's the kind
of job I took in 1939, after I graduated from college.
MASON: So in high school, the industrial arts-- I guess a
lot of people were coming in from rural areas. Was that
something that was emphasized in the high school because
they thought it was a practical thing to teach to people,
or was that something that you just personally were drawn
to because it had some attraction for you?
PURIFOY: I don't remember. I don't remember any specific
dialogue having to do with "If you can't do your academics,
you do the hand training." That was Booker T. Washington's
philosophy, which I don't know was evident in the high
school I went to or not. I went to high school in
Birmingham, and it was a very modern, contemporary high
school. I always lean towards the extracurricular events
and experiences, probably because I didn't do well with the
ABC's. It's likely. So I sang in the choir in high school
and stuff like that.
MASON: Did you not like school?
PURIFOY: I didn't like school very much. No, not very
much.
MASON: What do you remember not liking about it?
PURIFOY: I didn't know what it was talking about. It
didn't relate to me. I mean, it just sounded foreign to
me. My life experience was not related whatsoever to
education, what they were talking about, Lincoln and all
that stuff. My life experience was on the street, you
know, dealing with everyday habits, everydayness.
MASON: But then you ended up majoring in history or had a
minor in history in college. Did you change your mind
about that or--?
PURIFOY: About what?
MASON: About history. You were saying that Lincoln and
all that didn't relate to you, but then when you were in
college you ended up having a minor- -
PURIFOY: Yeah, but that was just the easiest stuff I could
take. It didn't have anything to do with preference
whatsoever. I mean, I didn't have-- You know, I did very
well in college. With the time I had to study, I didn't do
too badly. It was just in high school and elementary
school that I didn't do too well in academics because I
10
didn't know what they were talking about. But in college--
And incidentally, I went because there was nothing else to
do. I tried to get into the military, but I was rejected
for one reason or another. That was when I was
seventeen. After finishing high school, I had nothing in
particular to do.
MASON: Wasn't it expensive, though, to go to the college?
PURIFOY: I don't know. I didn't pay anything. I made
application in the spring of 1934, and then I went to
Tennessee to live with my sister [Ophelia Purifoy] during the
summer. When I got back, I received a letter saying that I
was rejected at Alabama State. I didn't accept that. I just
went on down there anyhow. I packed my few little things and
boarded an interstate bus, I think. It was about 130 miles
from Birmingham to Montgomery. I told them my story, that I
didn't have any money, that "You rejected my application, but
I'm here anyhow because I don't have anything else to do."
They said, "Well, we're sorry, we're filled up." I hung
around for about a week, sleeping wherever I could, in the
dormitory, in the hall, or anywhere. And finally I was
accepted. They said, "Okay, you can come on in." There was
a program called NYC, I believe. National Youth Corps [NYA,
National Youth Administration] . The president put me on that
list, and I received some moneys from them for my
education. The rest of it I worked out in the maintenance
11
department of the school . That ' s how I managed for four
years. I didn't have to pay anything.
MASON: You just said that what was going on in the streets
was more interesting to you. What was going on in the
streets that you were involved in while you were in school
that was more interesting than what you were doing in
school? You mentioned that you tried to go into the army
and they rejected you, so I suppose a lot of your buddies
had maybe joined, I don't know. What things were you
involved in outside of school that were important to you or
interesting to you?
PURIFOY: Well, that takes in a lot of years. While you
asked the question, I flashed back on what I was doing in
elementary school, and there wasn't much to do. There were
kids to play with, but otherwise it wasn't much-- We played
like the average children did. We made things to play
with. You see, the skateboard was something that highly
resembled the skateboards that they use today, except they
had a handle. We made it out of old skates. We made
wagons to play with, four-wheeled wagons, two-wheeled
wagons to play with. Nearby, in back of where we lived,
was a corn mill, and they threw away burlap sacks which the
corn came in to grind it up into meal. So I collected
these burlap sacks and spread them out and nailed them down
underneath the house where we lived, and I had a place to
12
retreat when I felt like being by myself or inviting kids
to come in and we'd play house and things like that. So it
was average kids ' play that involved whatever kids did at
the age of seven, eight, nine, and ten, up to twelve years
old. In high school, I had a couple of buddies, but I read
most of the time. I'd go to the library and--
MASON: What kinds of things?
PURIFOY: I'd check out a whole bunch of books and sit on
the porch and read, novels, most of them.
MASON: What was your taste back then? Just popular
novels?
PURIFOY: Yeah. Zane Grey, you know, stuff like that.
MASON: Then you went to the teachers college, after
teaching industrial arts.
PURIFOY: I think I went to war first.
MASON: So you were drafted eventually?
PURIFOY: Yeah.
MASON: Oh, I didn't know that.
PURIFOY: Yeah, I went to war first. Then when I came back
I entered graduate school .
MASON: What year were you drafted, then?
PURIFOY: In 1942. I wasn't drafted, I volunteered. I
volunteered .
MASON: And where were you sent when you were drafted?
PURIFOY: To the Pacific. From Port Hueneme, where they
13
train the Seabees. I was in the navy Seabees, the
construction battalion.
MASON: What is that exactly?
PURIFOY: Oh, you build airfields and Quonset huts and
prepare camps for the marines, facilities like they're
doing now in Iraq or Saudi Arabia. The Seabees have just
recently left Port Hueneme to go to Saudi Arabia to
construct airfields and stuff like that.
I was a carpenter's mate first-class, I think,
eventually. While I was in the military, there was a big
stink about prejudice and segregation and discrimination.
MASON: Was that something that you were involved in
personally, to try to get the military desegregated?
PURIFOY: Yeah. I'd lean toward controversy. There wasn't
much to-do, except we'd just talked it up and made it known
that we were unhappy about the discrimination and
segregation, where we were being managed by intellectually
inferior people. I had a degree in college when I went
into the military, and I was managed by some white cat who
hadn't even finished high school, and stuff like that.
They didn't recognize blacks who were reasonably
intelligent and could manage the navy better than the
management that they had. So we made it known that we
weren't happy with that,
MASON: Did anything come out of it?
14
PURIFOY: They had some investigations, but nothing
inunediate came out of it as far as our unit was
concerned. Except I got a promotion out of it and some
changes, I think, in the high echelon. The captain was
moved and somebody else put in his place. Yeah, some
things did happen of a small nature locally, that is, where
I was in the Pacific. But nationally, I think, is where
they commissioned some blacks both in the Air Corps as well
as the army. I don't know about the navy.
MASON: Is there anything else about the experience in the
service that you remember?
PURIFOY: No. No, nothing unusual.
MASON: Overall did you gain skills maybe that were useful
to you later?
PURIFOY: No. I used the skills that I already had to get
promotions and to have soft jobs. I was in the water
distillation, so I had a soft job. I watched the whole war
from a hilltop, where the purification units were, where we
made the water for the guys to drink. In the Pacific, I
saw our people bomb the island to smithereens and ships
split apart and all that. But I was above it all. I
experienced little or no danger in the attack.
MASON: Then after that you decided to go to graduate
school?
PURIFOY: Yeah, I came home, and I wanted to get a Ph.D.,
15
but I was embarrassed with the idea.
MASON: Why? Why were you embarrassed?
PURIFOY: Well, I always associated Ph.D.'s with the elite,
and I wanted to avoid these associations with the elite.
MASON: You mean like the bourgeoisie? Okay. What was so
distasteful about--?
PURIFOY: Because it was a white thing. I had experienced
enough prejudice to not have an affinity for anything
related to white society, and education of that ilk was
related to white society.
MASON: So you didn't want to be part of the "talented
tenth" or--
PURIFOY: No, I actually had a strong affinity for blacks,
and I wanted to experience us at the level where we lived
at. That [resulted in] my self-imposed poverty in my art
years. I did not want lots of money or lots of clothes or
anything like that. I wanted to experience what's it like
to be poor. I could have been not poor, but it was self-
imposed poverty. I wanted to know what it was like. I
wanted to experience all the ins and outs of poverty so
that I could report it as it was. Which accounts for the
media I used to express my feelings about the aesthetics.
MASON: When you say "report it," report it to whom?
PURIFOY: To the world. To anyone who would listen.
"Report" meaning any way you express yourself. In other
16
words, it was through art that I chose to express myself.
But I think we're getting ahead of the story here.
MASON: Okay, all right. So what did you study, then, at
the teachers college, specifically? What degree did you
get and what did that allow you to do?
PURIFOY: Well, when I got out of the service, I went to
Atlanta U[niversity] , where I studied social service
administration, social work. I got my degree in social
work, and I worked at it for two or three years, or three
or four years, in Cleveland and in Los Angeles.
MASON: What was the program like in Atlanta? I was going
to ask if you knew Hale Woodruff when he was there. You
weren't involved in the arts specifically then, but the
Atlanta University shows, the exhibitions of black art,
seem to have been kind of a big thing back then. I'm
wondering if that ever crossed your path while you were
there at all.
PURIFOY: No, I wasn't interested in art at the time. I
was actually interested in social work, because I figured
it was a means by which I could help black people. In
other words, I could inject here that I was programmed to
do good, and that's the worst kind of goodness, which we
can get into some other time. My whole concept of-- I
think my mother must have held me up by the heels when I
was not two years old yet and said that I had to be
17
somebody. So I set off to interpret that for the rest of
my life. And my schooling was a means by which I thought
that I could best express myself, if I was educated in the
field that I chose to express myself. So that's why I took
up social work. Eventually, after doing art, I was able to
put together all my skills and become reasonably effective
in areas of doing good. We can check up on that later.
^4AS0N: So what was the program? I mean, what did you have
to do to get this degree in social work? Was there like an
internship involved? Or do you remember any of the reading
that you had to do that you thought was helpful? Or do you
remember any professors that you studied with that were
helpful to you in any way? Was there anything about it
itself that was interesting for you, or was it just
something that you just thought, you know, you had to do to
get through so you could--?
PURIFOY: Well, academically, I was a poor student. So I
was helped by my classmates in the university to pass the
tests and whatnot. That's how I got to graduate.
18
TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO
SEPTEMBER 8, 1990
MASON: You were saying that your classmates helped you get
through school and that you were a poor student
academically but you got help. I was just asking, were
there any professors who were important to you or any
reading that you did that really stuck in your mind or that
you go back to today?
PURIFOY: Yeah. I can remember now. I was introduced to
psychology in graduate school, which interested me a great
deal, up to recent years, in fact. As a result of my
education at the university, I developed an interest in
Heidegger and Husserl ' s concept of existentialism. It grew
out of my study of psychology and psychiatry. Sigmund
Freud was a very interesting person to me at the time. And
I thought that-- I wanted to explore the possibility that
blacks could use psychotherapy. Of course, I found out
later that uneducated people [find it] difficult to use
that discipline for good health--for health, as the case
may be. But that was my sustained interest after my
university stint, and that's my sustained interest
throughout the years. It was very popular in art, as the
case was. So I did utilize psychotherapy as an art
discipline.
When we get to discussing some of my artwork, as you
19
intimated earlier, there was a piece that I did called Six
Birds, which was shown at the [California] Afro-American
[Museum] exhibition ["19 Sixties: A Cultural Awakening Re-
evaluated, 1965-1975"] at Exposition Park recently, and we
can talk about that.
MASON: Well, we can talk about that now, since you brought
it up, instead of waiting for it to come along. Let's see,
what year did you do that?
PURIFOY: I went to Atlanta in 1946, I believe, 1945. Wait
a minute. It must be down there. I don't quite recall
specifically. It's not a university--
MASON: I had '48 when you got your degree, I think.
PURIFOY: A '48 degree?
MASON: Yeah.
PURIFOY: So I must have gone there in 1946. I was there
two years.
MASON: I have that you did Six Birds in '67.
PURIFOY: Uh-huh. Six Birds was one of many pieces I did
with psychological overtones. It was a very somber
piece. Black on black I was experimenting with at the
time, where across the front of a screened area were seven
objects that looked like birds. I imagined on the other
side of this screened area was somebody peeping out, maybe
a prisoner someplace, where what he saw was confined to a
small area. So oftentimes the truth is not evident.
20
because if he had been outside, he would have counted seven
birds instead of six. The caption said they were all
different colors, but they weren't all different colors--
it was just one color. So that became a very popular
piece. I don't want to use the word "popular." It was an
extremely significant piece.
I recall that the [Los Angeles] County Museum of Art
had solicited it from me to put down in the rental
gallery. Somebody came from the East to look at my work,
and I sent him over to the rental gallery in the museum.
He saw Six Birds and beat it back and bought it right away.
MASON: Who was this who came from the East to look at your
work? What was his name? Was it a private collector or--?
PURIFOY: No, it was somebody from the Whitney Museum [of
American Art] in New York [Robert M. Doty]. It's down
there someplace. Six Birds, Whitney Museum. And it was
borrowed, as I said earlier, from the Whitney to show in
this Exposition [Park] exhibition.
MASON: That was the "19 Sixties" Olympics exhibition.
Was Jung at all popular or interesting to you?
Because I know he became, I guess, more popular in the
fifties, with--
PURIFOY: Carl Jung?
MASON: Yeah.
PURIFOY: Yeah. You know, in the fifties we all were
21
interested in the new life, so to speak, the new concepts
and all. It seemed as though the sixties movement was
vaguely based on a European concept of freedom, manifested
by Carl Jung and Jean-Paul Sartre. These people were
quoted often as the seekers and the leaders of freedom. I
went a little further and studied, as I said earlier, from
two other people who I thought had gone beyond Carl Jung
and Jean-Paul. They were Heidegger and Husserl, the
fathers of existentialism. Existence and existentialism
were so closely interrelated with each other with an
outstanding philosopher in America, whose name I can't
recall at the time [William James] . He would have been the
father of existentialism had he been a European. Because
he had written earlier about the freedom of the mind to do
what it was inclined to do, that the body could develop
more healthfully if the mind was constructed in a way in
which it had knowledge of the body interrelated with the
mind. So in those early years of the freedom movement, the
body-mind thing was then thought of to interrelate with
each other, to be equal to each other. To me that was
extremely profound, that my body and mind had been
estranged. It gave me impetus to want to interrelate them,
to become one. So during the height of my art years, I
also experienced something extremely profound in that I had
these oceanic experiences.
22
MASON: I'm sorry, what kind of experiences?
PURIFOY: Oceanic experiences. Are you familiar with that?
MASON: No, not at all.
PURIFOY: Well, I started out by levitating. Lying on the
floor in the morning and it appeared that my body was off
the floor. I could lie there for hours on end, and the
time passed without my knowledge. Sometimes I'd look up
and I'd been there four hours levitating.
MASON: Is this something you knew you could do? Or did it
just happen once or — ?
PURIFOY: Well, it was interrelated with the mind-body
thing and art. All that was interrelated with itself, with
each other, with my study of existentialism and whatnot.
It brought all of this about.
It also brought back my childhood, too, and my basic
self. I was basically a good person. And as I told you
earlier, I was programmed to do good. But a good person
and doing good are not the same. They're different.
Oftentimes I think of Martin Luther King [Jr.] as a person
who was programmed to do good. He couldn't do otherwise,
because his name was Martin Luther. Martin Luther was a
Christian of the earlier years. "King" is somebody who
wears a crown, "Junior" somebody: belonged to somebody
else. So he was not himself, he wasn't a person. He was a
manifestation of someone else's idea. Maybe his father or
23
mother Imbued him with the need to do good because the
black race which he belonged to needed his help. Well, I
was pretty much the same kind of person. I chose to
express it in art, rather than in religion, as Martin
Luther King did.
MASON: So you would say that organized religion wasn't
really a big part of your life after you left home.
PURIFOY: No, I abhorred it. I abhorred organized
religion. It was an ugly thing. Particularly manifested
in Catholicism.
MASON: How did you come into contempt of Catholicism?
PURIFOY: Oh, that wealth and all that pomp turned me off
completely.
MASON: But you said your family was Methodist. How did
you come in contact with the Catholic church?
PURIFOY: The media. [laughter]
MASON: Okay, okay. I didn't know if you had a friend
maybe you went to church with or--
PURIFOY: No, no, the media. And being interested in doing
good, you want to be knowledgeable of all of the things in
life that are supposed to do good. Well, Catholicism
wasn't one of them.
MASON: What about Methodism or another religion that you
remember from back then?
PURIFOY: No, that wasn't one either. No kind of organized
24
religion was-- I wasn't interested in any kind of organized
religion at all. I take that back. My childhood
experience was sprinkled with episodes of the influence of
organized religion. I remember quite distinctly every year
Father Divine would come to Birmingham. Remember Father
Divine?
MASON: Yeah. He was based in Harlem, I guess.
PURIFOY: Yeah. He would make a yearly trek to Alabama, to
Birmingham, and set up this big tent where everybody came
to try to get religion. He would lay on hands and all that
stuff. People would fall out, you know, with the spirit
and all of that. Well, every time, every year he'd come,
from the time I was twelve years old till I was fifteen,
I'd go to these meetings and try to get religion. I ' d go
up there and bow down and strain hard to get religion.
Instead, I always got an erection. I got a hard-on
straining to get religion. That was the manifestation, the
result of my straining.
So I developed a problem that took me years and years
to resolve. I had a conflict between sex and religion. In
later years, to resolve the problem, I was about to say how
often I went to church on Sundays, different kinds of
church, looking for the spirit, looking for the kind of
things that people testify about on Monday morning. They'd
knock on everybody's door and say, "I got the spirit, I got
25
religion." You must be familiar with that.
MASON: Yeah.
PURIFOY: Well, yes, that's how Christianity influenced
me. Until I was in my early adulthood, I struggled to
attain that great something that everybody thought was so
great and everything. But I didn't ever succeed, so I
abandoned it. In other words, I silently, without
announcing it, became an atheist. You know, I don't know
what an atheist is, except one who does not believe in
God. But to this day, I've had no god. I wish I did
sometimes, but I don't. And that probably concludes my
religious experience.
26
TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE
SEPTEMBER 8, 1990
MASON: We ended up talking about religion. Is there
anything else that you wanted to add to that? Because I
guess the next thing we'll talk about is your work as a
social worker.
PURIFOY: After I got my degree from Atlanta U[niversity] ,
I came back to Cleveland, where my family was, and got a
job at Cuyahoga County child welfare [Cuyahoga County
Department of Social Services] , and I worked there two
years. My responsibility was the total care for youth. I
had mostly infants and youth in early childhood. I had to
find them a place to live and provide clothing and so
forth--total care. We also were an adoption agency, so I
did all that. It was an interesting experience. I put my
education to use in a most profound way, because I had an
opportunity to do so. I felt gratified.
Now, I was offered a job at another institution, where
I worked for about three months, at a mental institution,
as a bibliotherapist . Bibliotherapy does not work with
mental patients. I don't know why--
MASON: What is bibliotherapy?
PURIFOY: I don't know why they felt it worked, but it did
not. Not because I was a failure, but because the whole
program was a failure.
27
MASON: What is bibliotherapy?
PURIFOY: You expose adults and young adults to books that
you think will improve their mental condition. And I left
there. It was too depressing a kind of a job, and I
couldn't relate to those people. You know, it's outside of
my realm of--
MASON: The patients or the administrators?
PURIFOY: Patients. So I left Ohio and came to California,
because I'd been in the military service in California, and
I dreamed of returning, because it was a very pleasant
experience.
MASON: I just wanted to try to get some more detail about
the social work. When you said it was depressing and the
program was a failure, what did you mean by that?
PURIFOY: Well, I left there and went to Los Angeles and
got a job at the [Los Angeles] County Hospital, where I
worked for two or three years. I couldn't get along with
my supervisors, primarily because they were all women. I
had a problem with that- -being bossed by a female. I never
overcame it because I didn't have to. I just went from job
to job. But I had a tendency to work fast with the
patients, and I was in charge of patients who had problems
accepting medical help, mostly religious people. Seventh
Day Adventists, that type of thing, who had problems
accepting medical help sometimes. And I had mental
28
patients as well. I would discharge them rapidly because
the hospital needed the beds. My supervisors were
concerned about my being able to discharge people so
fast.
And also I didn't like my coworkers, because social
workers have a certain personality type that believes that
they're God. It's just like it's their money instead of
the state's money. Socially, they were hard to get along
with because they brought their work home with them, etc.
So I finally left the hospital after two or three
years and made application to Chouinard Art Institute, just
out of the clear blue. I passed that one day and said, "I
think I want to go to art school . " And I was accepted
without portfolio or anything,
MASON: Really? Now, that's unusual because-- Well, the
interview I did with-- Well, Bill [William] Pajaud was one
of the earliest black people to go to Chouinard, and he
talked (well, it's in a book [Robert Ferine ' s Chouinard, an
Art Vision Betrayed; The Story of the Chouinard Art
Institute, 1921-1972] ) about Chouinard, about the prejudice
that Nelbert Chouinard, the one who founded the art school,
had toward blacks. They didn't want blacks to go to the
school .
PURIFOY: I didn't experience that. I was considered the
first full-time black student. I didn't experience any
29
prejudices.
MASON: You were there from '52 to '56, I guess.
PURIFOY: Yeah.
MASON: Well, that's interesting that they accepted you
even without a portfolio. How did you--?
PURIFOY: I was the poorest student there.
MASON: How did you convince them to let you in?
PURIFOY: I don't know. I just walked in, said I wanted to
go to school there, and they said, "Okay."
MASON: That's amazing! When did you--?
PURIFOY: I thought it was par for the course. I didn't
know that it was unusual. Mrs. Chouinard, I was on
speaking terms with her, and she never showed any signs of
prejudice or discrimination.
I started out majoring in industrial art, and they
discontinued that course my second year there, so I
switched to fine arts. I remember my ceramics teacher most
of all, whose name was-- What was her name? Susan
Peterson. She came after Peter Voulkos. I never got a
chance to study under Peter Voulkos, but I got a chance to
observe his work and all.
MASON: What did you think of his work?
PURIFOY: I thought his little stuff was great, but his big
stuff was just terrible. But he got big. Artists have a
tendency to want to get big when they're successful at
30
small stuff. He was very successful at making small stuff,
and he had, at the time, a very enviable reputation. Now
he's probably world-known, no doubt. But I rubbed elbows
with those people, and they influenced me a great deal in
terms of accepting me as a student. Now, Susan thought I
was a beautiful person, so I did great work, although I
didn't ever want to be a ceramicist. But I did good work
because she was so amiable.
MASON: Do you have any of those pieces?
PURIFOY: No. I kept one piece for a long time, and I sold
it. It was a head--an African ceramic head. I never
bothered about trying to duplicate the human image. I
always had an opposition to that. So I refused to draw. I
refused to learn to draw. Today, I cannot draw, because I
was afraid I'd get stuck with the human image, and I knew
it didn't express my basic feeling about nature and about
being: that the human is not the essence of being. The
human in relationship to the world is the essence of
being. And I knew that even then. Therefore I had
problems trying to draw, because the drawing always
includes the human figure. There's the model sitting there
naked and whatnot. You're supposed to duplicate that. I
thought it was copying.
So I never did go for landscape or anything like that,
because I didn't see-- You can't make it better, so I
31
didn't see-- They had it wrong. The creativity was not
manifested in either nature or human nature, because it was
always predictable. So I didn't see art as-- I don't know
where I got these ideas from about art, but I found in
later years that it's as close to the creative process as
any thinking ever was. I don't know where I got it from,
but somehow I got into art knowing all that already. I
don't know where I got it from, as I say.
But anyhow, what turned me on to art, really, was art
history. That probably relates to where you are at. When
I got to study how art is formed and all the kinds of
manifestations, it gave me the impetus to do art. Because
I had these things inside of me ready to be expressed, but
I didn't have a media through which to express them. I
tried education, that didn't work. I tried social work,
that didn't work. I'd try this and that, didn't work. It
didn't communicate to the people my deep feelings. So I
was almost always at a loss to feel that I was
understood. And art, being a nonverbal language, enabled
me to feel I at least understood myself, if others didn't.
MASON: So you felt it was through this ceramics that you
did that?
PURIFOY: Yeah, Susan helped me along to realize my full
potential .
MASON: Did you have a personal relationship with her or
32
just student- teacher?
PURIFOY: No, she was just a good person. She was a great
person, that's all.
MASON: What about other people in the school? Did you--?
Because there were some big names at Chouinard. Robert
Irwin was there, and I think John Altoon was there, you
know, as students. Did you interact with these students in
any way?
PURIFOY: No, I didn't have much time to fool around,
because I had to work in order to pay my tuition. I worked
out at the Douglas Aircraft [Company] defense plant at
night.
MASON: What did you do there?
PURIFOY: I operated a shearing machine that cut metal a
certain size into templates. Then after I couldn't manage
that any longer, because it took up a good deal of time,
going to and fro and working all night and whatnot, I got a
job at Cannel [and Schaffen] Interior Designs on Wilshire
Boulevard. They had a big shop on Wilshire Boulevard full
of furniture. I was a window trimmer. So I could set the
furniture up and dress it off and whatnot.
MASON: Did you like that or it was just a job?
PURIFOY: I never liked to work, particularly work for
somebody else. No, I didn't particularly like it. In
fact, I got fired because I wanted to sell furniture. You
33
know, I wanted to be an interior designer. That's what I
studied in school. And that wasn't the right place to
express myself. I'd come work extra on Saturdays, show
customers around without permission, and the management
didn't like that. They didn't want black interior
designers. You know, they wondered where I got the gall
from. So just before I graduated I got fired from that
job.
MASON: What kind of furniture did they have? Did they
have a lot of modern furniture?
PURIFOY: Oh, yes. The very best.
MASON: Do you remember some of the names?
PURIFOY: Yeah. Heritage. Are you familiar with the
Heritage line of furnishings? Herman Miller. Boy, those
are two of the greatest lines in the country. Still are.
[laughter]
MASON: Okay, well, I don't know.
PURIFOY: Yeah. They had everything. You know, from
Biedermeier, French Provincial, Louis XV, XVI -- They had
everything. They had three floors stacked with every kind
of furniture you can name. And a lot of great interior
designers.
So after I graduated, I didn't go into interior
design, because you have to have your own business and
whatnot. Nobody wants to hire you. I had woodworking
34
skills, so I got a job at Angelus Furniture [Warehouse]
company designing furniture.
MASON: So you ended up taking your degree in interior
design? I mean, you went from industrial arts to fine arts
to--?
PURIFOY: Well, no. No, I majored in fine arts, but my
skills were industrial arts, you know, because of my high
school training and whatnot. I was always good with my
hands, and I could operate any kind of machinery. So I got
this job designing furniture. But I couldn't design
anything that they could make commercially. It was too
expensive.
MASON: What did they look like? Or what was the concept?
PURIFOY: Modern stuff. Contemporary. I was really up to
snuff because I was going to school. I just had a year of
industrial design, and the rest of it was spent drawing
this and that, drawing interiors. I took all my drawing
classes where I could draw interiors. The rest of the
class weren't drawing interiors, for the most part. They
were drawing Louis XV and Louis XVI interiors and excerpts
from interiors and whatnot, but basically it was a figure-
drawing class. They let me get away with drawing anything
I wanted to draw, just so long as I was drawing.
MASON: I was just thinking that Irving Blum came-- Do you
know Irving Blum? He had a gallery [Ferus Gallery; Blum
35
Helmon Gallery] for a while. When he was in New York, he
worked for this contemporary art store. That's kind of how
he got his start in the arts. I was just wondering, since
you were interested in that, if you had had any contact
with him at all.
PURIFOY: No. After I left, I took a job operating one of
the machines, after they couldn't use my designs at Angelus
Furniture company. They still exist, of course. They make
cheap furniture and-- Nothing of consequence now, but they
used to be a leading furniture manufacturer in Los
Angeles. After I left there, I started doing window
trimming at the Broadway department store.
MASON: Because that was the only thing you could find or--?
PURIFOY: Related to my skills, yes.
MASON: When you graduated, you must have had some idea or
vision of where you wanted to go with your life then. Do
you remember what that was? Did you have any plans?
PURIFOY: Well, while I was at Chouinard, I met a student —
a part-time student--whose name was John Smith, and he was
already an interior designer. He was a mail carrier while
he studied at Chouinard and other places to be an interior
designer.
MASON: Was he a black guy?
PURIFOY: Uh-huh. Finally, he was able to just exclusively
do interior design. I went in with him more or less and
36
did the things in interior design that he didn't want to
do, like hanging drapery and supervising the carpet laying,
and all that type of thing, in my spare time after working
eight hours at the Broadway, with the idea that I would
eventually go into interior design.
Well, I actually became a better designer than my
friend, but I couldn't please Mrs. Jones. You know, I
would go and hang the drapery and have the carpet laid and
do this and that, tear out this wall and design furniture
and have it custom-made and all that. But she'd keep
calling me back about something wrong. Now, I couldn't
endure that. I just hated that kind of thing, that I could
never complete a job. I mean, they'll call you back to do
something over. So for those reasons, interior design did
not appeal to me as such. It was exciting, because I love
color, fabric, and that type of thing. But I couldn't work
with the people, which was one of my basic problems anyhow.
MASON: What do you mean? It was a basic problem?
PURIFOY: Dealing with personalities. That's when Sigmund
Freud became so interesting to me, that he dealt with these
archetypes. Carl Jung spoke about them extensively.
Psychology has a tendency to put people in pigeonholes- -
categorize them- -for your own aggrandizement, your own
satisfaction, your own comfort in the universe, in the
world. It's better to deal with somebody you know- -or at
37
least you think you know- -because you put them in this
little box, and you know all about that little box and
what's in it. So you put them in that little box, and you
could deal with them. You see them coming a mile away.
You know what they're going to say. You know what they're
going to do.
So I had a tendency to interpret psychology in this
way, and I made a fairly good adjustment with people as a
result of doing so, knowing full well it was unfair. But
for my own peace of mind, so to speak, that's the way I got
along in the world.
MASON: So you were finished with the interior design, and
then what did you do? What years was that? Let's see. You
graduated in '56. You were at the Broadway from '56 to '64.
PURIFOY: Uh-huh. Then came Watts. Eve Echelman, somebody
who worked for the Watts Towers Committee [Committee to
Save Simon Rodia's Towers in Watts]-- They had hired
someone to look after their business in Watts, look after
the towers, look after the little school they had. They
were looking for somebody with an art degree and some
experience with social service, which was me. I was
unemployed at the time, and I said, "Well, that sounds just
like me." And I split for Watts.
MASON: Where were you living at the time when you were
working at the Broadway?
38
PURIFOY: On La Brea [Avenue] .
MASON: What kind of community was that there?
PURIFOY: On La Brea? Well, everybody knows about that old
house I had. I had moved there when the rent was $50 a
month, and I'd probably been there twenty years or fifteen
years or so when I went to work in Watts. That little
place where I lived became a center for most of the artists
and people I know that would come through and sit and--
MASON: This was after you started to work at the center?
PURIFOY: No.
MASON: Oh, it was before.
PURIFOY: Yeah.
MASON: Oh, well, we should talk about that, then, before
we get--
PURIFOY: Well, I got interested in high fidelity and sound
and record collection.
MASON: What kind of music? I know there were some jazz
musicians who came out to L.A.
PURIFOY: Yeah. I was already a student of jazz, and I
hired a tutor to teach me to appreciate classics. Because
I had little or no classical background. I felt a dire
need to understand the classics, because I hated Beethoven
or anything that sounded like Beethoven. Everybody says
Beethoven's so great and all. If I can't see the
greatness, there's something wrong with me. I said.
39
"There's definitely nothing wrong with me, you know, never
has been. There's something wrong with you all who think
Beethoven is that great. Don't you hear the overtones
here? That music is only for a few ears. It doesn't
relate to where I am or where I've been or where I'm going
in the least. It doesn't relate. But yet I have to know
about it." So I bought a whole bunch of classics and I got
a tutor, and he tried to teach me to appreciate classical
music. Failed miserably.
MASON: Where was your tutor from?
PURIFOY: I don't recall who it was. It was just somebody
that I knew. It wasn't anybody of note. It was just
somebody who appreciated the classics and who could talk
about them intelligently. Well, I wasn't satisfied with
just the sound coming out of two speakers. I had to apply
my skills and construct a nine-foot cabinet to hold my
instruments. I designed my own speakers, and the sound was
superb. There wasn't anything such as-- I forget the
terms. But anyhow, I had the latest sounds around. And
people came from far and near to hear. I was stepping over
people over the weekend whom I didn't even know. They were
flopping at my pad all day and all night. But I encouraged
this because I had a need to want to understand people. I
had a problem with people. You're not supposed to have a
problem with people if you're going to influence them. So
40
I had a need for people to gather around me, and they came
from everywhere. I developed some interesting friends as
the results of that. Harry Drinkwater, a photographer, was
one. We still are friends, wherever he's at.
In other words, although I liked girls a lot, I didn't
know how to approach them. I always would approach girls
as though they were my sisters, to be corrected if they're
wrong. That didn't strike well. So I had real problems
with girls, not only with people, but girls. I knew that
didn't make for a very well rounded life. I knew the
cause, basically, of my inability to relate to women was
because I had six sisters. I couldn't be natural around
them. I'm acting like a brother all the time. A girl
doesn't want a brother, she wants a lover.
I thought it was black women that I was having this
problem with, so I started going with white women because
they were available to me. And I did a little better. To
say the least, I did a little better. Then I could look at
a black woman as my sister and it was okay. If I have sex
with her, you know, I feel a little bit guilty, because I
feel like it's incest. You know what I mean? But I waited
too long to relate to women in ways in which I could
anticipate marriage. So I became a stud, in a way. Women
who were ashamed to be with me in polite company would come
on Saturday morning and spend the day. These were black
41
women. I felt really comfortable with these women whom I
could relate to this way with no future, no anticipation.
They thought they were getting away with something, and I
was getting away with having a satisfying relationship with
a black female without any attachments, which I always felt
there ought to have been. In order to relate intimately,
there should be some projection into the future, like where
are we going, etc. So this went on for years. It was
gratifying.
I began to like myself better, and consequently I
could go on and do my work. That's when I started to do
art. I quit the Broadway department store, came home, and
just sat around for a year thinking about doing art. I had
one drawing that I copied somewhere, and that was the focal
point with everybody who came to talk. I had a studio
clean enough to eat off the table. I never did a lick of
work there. I wasn't in the studio. I had a beret and
all. I ate cheese and drank wine, but I wasn't an artist
yet until Watts. That made me an artist.
MASON: I want to hear more about this period and some of
your other friends, because it seems that there are a lot
of sort of bohemian enclaves for artists in the fifties,
different jazz clubs people would hang out at.
PURIFOY: I wasn't even an artist, but they flocked around
me anyhow because I pretended to be an artist. I'd
42
graduated from art school, and I had ten years of
experience vaguely with artists. So I was accepted as an
artist. In fact, I didn't have anything to show for it.
^4AS0N: Did you have any friends who called themselves
artists?
PURIFOY: Just about like myself. Sunday painters. That's
about the extent of it.
MASON: Did they ever go on to practice it full-time or
not?
PURIFOY: Well, after I started doing art, then the artists
came. I was the artist's artist. They dug my work, my
mannerism and my style, more than the people did. It was
the artists that corralled around me because I had words to
say about art, to relate to art. Having three academic
degrees by then, I was pretty verbal and astute. And I was
also extremely knowledgeable about people, because I had so
many problems with them in growing up and so forth. I had
a whole flock of people around me all the time. It came in
real handy when I originated "66 Signs of Neon." I had all
the help I needed.
MASON: What about the art history? Did you continue to
read about that or learn about that or visit the galleries
and the museums?
PURIFOY: I visited galleries and museums frequently.
MASON: Which ones did you go to?
43
PURIFOY: The [Los Angeles] County Museum [of Art] I
frequented often and the galleries on La Cienega
[Boulevard] every Monday night. That was before I was a
full-time artist. Simply because not only was I interested
in art--knowing about art--I was also interested in what
was going on. So I went down to Tijuana once a week. I
was interested in knowing what was happening in the
community all over the place. I went to UCLA to hear all
their concerts. Till Stravinsky died, I saw every one of
his. So I was just knowledgeable about what was going on
all over the place. I wasn't participating. I was just
knowledgeable about it, because I felt responsible to know.
MASON: What about assemblage art in particular? There was
the Ferus Gallery that Ed [Edward] Kienholz had, and he
would show his friends assemblage art.
PURIFOY: Well, I always thought I was better than
Kienholz, simply because my things did not extract from an
individual that which he didn't choose to give. Kienholz
did that, and I didn't like that.
MASON: Extract from an individual--?
PURIFOY: That which he didn't intend to give. Pathos.
That's Kienholz. Kienholz has all the characteristics of
the Jew that wants you to feel bad because he wants you to
feel bad. His hospital scenes and all are evidence of
that. And I didn't like that. I didn't care about that.
44
We both showed in Germany, but I never did like Kienholz's
stuff. You've probably read articles about--
MASON: Yeah, they compared your —
PURIFOY: Right.
MASON: You did a tableau for the —
PURIFOY: I resented that. I didn't ever do it publicly,
but I resented being compared with Kienholz. I thought I
was more of a person than that, to do stuff like that.
45
TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO
SEPTEMBER 8, 1990
PURIFOY: When the U.S. Office of Information asked me if I
wanted to exhibit in Germany in a recycling exhibition they
were having over there-- When was it? Nineteen something.
MASON: In '67? I don't see it right away. We can fill it
in later. It was around '68.
PURIFOY: They'd tell me who was going to be showing, you
know, and give me a choice to decide whether I wanted to
show or not. Because of the title of the exhibit, some of
the people refused to show. Among them was what ' s-her-
name, who does these shadow-box things, Louise Nevelson.
But anyhow, Kienholz and I were the ones who committed
ourselves to showing in Germany.
MASON: Okay. I have it here. It was 1972, and it's
"Garbage Needs Recycling."
PURIFOY: Right. Even then I'd already formulated some
concepts about Kienholz. He seems to be the subject
here. I was supposed to feel like something showing with
him, but I didn't. It didn't matter with me.
MASON: But you knew about his work from the galleries
prior to the show.
PURIFOY: Yeah, from seeing it.
MASON: You didn't like it then, and you never did like it.
PURIFOY: I never did like it, no.
46
MASON: Well, we should talk about your installation, then,
at the Brockman Gallery, even though we're jumping ahead.
But as long as we're talking about-- Because you were
compared to Kienholz a lot with that, with the tableau,
with the long titles. Niggers Ain't Never Ever Gonna Be
Nothin'--All They Want To Do Is Drink + Fuck. Could you
talk about that piece and what you were trying to do with
it and anything else you want to--? [tape recorder off]
PURIFOY: The best example of what I'm talking about has to
do with the world of the spirit, Christianity, and
religion. Now, those people are hard sell. They want
everybody in the world to be like them, so that's why they
spread the word. Well, artists have taken on some of the
same characteristics as religion, and I think it's not cool
at all. It has little or nothing to do with the creative
process as it is. My ideas come from having people try to
influence me into becoming someone other than who I am at
their will instead of my own. When artists begin to use
their work to communicate something that they think people
ought to be or feel, I think it's an af f rontation, and I
think art loses its real essence, based on the creative
process.
The creative process is something that you never know
enough about. Even though you do art for all your life, or
two lifetimes, you do it without a knowledge of the
47
creative process, which is very interesting. So I made a
long study of the creative process and attempted to relate
it to art. They're two different extremes. Art and the
creative process are not one and the same thing. My idea
is to interrelate them if I can, like I attempted to
interrelate my mind with my body to make one whole
person. I think most of the things in the world--idea-
wise, particularly--need to be related to human beings or
related to one another. In other words, I lived almost a
half to two-thirds of a lifetime telling other people how
to live without applying it to my own self. One day I
turned around and said, "Is what I know applicable to
me?" It was the most upsetting idea I ever had in my whole
life. In fact, I'm not over with it yet. Because all that
I ever was was not applicable to me. Because I thought I
was okay. "It's the world that's wrong, not me." You can
imagine what it's like to carry that around with you all
your life and resort to art as an escape. That's what art
was for me to begin with, at the beginning.
MASON: When you did your installation at the Brockman
Gallery, that was in '71, and people were really moved by
it. How would you compare what you were trying to do then
with what Kienholz was trying to do at that time?
PURIFOY: Well, actually I've never been satisfied with
little things that hang on the wall. That's how I started
48
out, because that was the best way I could express
myself. I didn't even have an easel. I worked on this
thing for a week or two lying flat on the table, and I
never really saw it until I hung it up one day. I thought
it was finished, so I hung it up. And I was bowled over
with the idea that I could transfer my ideas from my head
to a board, but it never satisfied me as an expression. I
just thought there was some absence, some lacking in it.
As a result of that opposition to flat stuff hanging on the
wall, I went to the environment. It was a likely place to
go. That was my thinking all along, and still is. That
accounts for this piece out here.
The pieces at Brockman were the first and the last
environmental pieces I made until I came to the desert. It
was probably more gratifying than anything else I've ever
done, also, and the least creative.
MASON: Could you describe it? Because I've never seen any
photographs of it anywhere, just a few verbal records.
PURIFOY: Yeah, I have a tape of it, I think. Somebody
filmed it. No sound, but-- Yeah, I've got sound, I
think. I will attempt to find it before this is over with.
It was a one-room apartment in the upstairs section of
the Brockman Gallery. Here's the bathroom, and here's the
kitchen, and the rest of the space was allocated to the
bedroom. So there was one bed here, and the rest of the
49
space was lined with pallets--that is, mattress on the
floor and blankets and whatnot. The whole place was
treated. The walls were treated with torn wallpaper and
old photographs of black people and pictures of Jesus
Christ, implying the religious overtones. There were ten
of these pallets on the floor with mannequins in them,
covered over with blankets. Here were people lying on the
floor--the so-called members of the family--and you just
saw the shape of the person because they were mannequins on
mattresses. I got all this from the junk pile.
But in one bed was a male and female, called mother
and father, and baby. The mother and father were having
sex while the baby watched on. These figures were animated
to move up and down. They were also covered with blankets,
so you could just see the movement up and down, that's what
you could see. On the nightstand beside the bed were
liquor bottles and whatnot, like what people engage in in
their waking hours. Somewhere was a television splattering
at midnight with no picture, just sound. Somewhere was a
radio spieling out sound simultaneously with the TV, as is
evident among poor or black people. In the kitchen here
was a sink and the kitchen table with chairs. There were
roaches crawling on the kitchen table and evidence of rats
around. A refrigerator that had an astounding odor when
opened. This was the entrance. People would come to the
50
door and fall back, for the most part. [laughter] They
couldn't endure the reality of what was going on. The
bathroom was also fetid, in every regard. I didn't
overlook any aspect of a whole apartment, so to speak, in
trying to give it the very essence of poverty and the way
black people live. So therefore, it wasn't creative as
such. It was a duplication of what was real.
MASON: This was what you had seen while you were a social
worker .
PURIFOY: Yeah, during my course. Now, during the
reception we had black-eyed peas and corn bread. I made it
myself. The music that was going was my voice singing the
hymns and whatnot. The tape was going all the time, and it
was really a great scene. [There was] very little light in
there. Just enough to show off what was going on, more or
less. There was a passageway right through the kitchen to
the back end, where people would go through and come out
somewhere. Few people milled around. Few. But some
did. But most people came to this point- -
MASON: Yeah, the entrance.
PURIFOY: --and went back thataway. Now, this was
extremely effective, because it was an absolute truth. I
wasn't trying to communicate anything more than what was
real, what was happening. If anybody had any deep feelings
about poverty, it was unintentional. That is to say, it
51
was just my privilege--instead of prerogative--to show
this.
And, of course, I express my appreciation to Alonzo
[Davis] for giving me the exhibit and all, but he behaved
just like everybody else, in a way. In other words, I
expected somebody to help me move the refrigerator up there
at least, you know--up those stairs. Everybody was anxious
to see it complete. Nobody came to observe the
installation. They wanted to see it complete. In other
words, Alonzo stayed out himself and kept other people out
until it was all finished.
It was rather gratifying. I don't know how successful
it was, with one exception. People still remember that
exhibit today. You know, that's part of the essence of art
is that aspects of it--seeing with the eye and recognizing
with the mind- -are a permanent experience, unforgettable
experience.
This in itself was incomplete. There was another part in
my mind to put with this, and that's Extreme Object D-E-D.
Where these people are having sex and having a ball up
here, downstairs I had hoped to have two white people
sitting on the side of the bed opposite each other, staring
out in space, with the space all decorated with French
Provincial and whatnot and a Rolls Royce parked on the
outside. William Wilson, the art critic, his comment was
52
that he'd never seen this kind of exhibit before in all his
experience. That's what he wrote about it. It's in one of
those articles you probably have. He said the only thing
that was absent was the rest of the exhibit that I intended
to present. I didn't know how he knew that, but that's the
statement he made. That the only thing absent about the
whole exhibit was that the opposite wasn't on display--you
know, the elite part. For years I had hoped to do that
exhibit over with this whole thing, but finally I abandoned
it because I abandoned art in the interim. [tape recorder
off]
MASON: Okay, there's something that you wanted to add
about the exhibit.
PURIFOY: Yeah. It was meant for black people. It was my
continuous zeal to communicate to black people some idea
about who they were really, with the hope that they could
manifest some change in their general conditions and
status. That's really inherent in the title. Niggers Ain ' t
Gonna Never Be Nothin'--All They Want To Do Is Drink +
Fuck. Now, the blacks that I've interrelated with most of
my life know nothing else other than what I described
here: all the poverty and how you escape it by drinking
and having sex. What I meant to communicate was that
there's more to life than that. I don't know to what
extent the people whom it was meant for got to see it.
53
because they don't come to the Brockman Gallery. But
that's to whom it was directed, and that's part of my
original premise, to communicate to my own people what I
think they need to know in order to better themselves.
In Watts-- That was my idea, not of bettering Watts,
but to get the hell out. You know, find some means by
which you can get the hell out of here and go somewhere
else where you can be influenced by some other elements,
because you'll never improve yourself here. That was my
idea of bringing to the black public a reminder of "This is
either where you are or where you're going." Being on
welfare and whatnot is-- There's a better life than that.
"From one generation to another, you know, you've always
been on welfare. Well, this is where that leads to." Now
it's drugs, so my prediction was quite correct. I was
concerned also about the school dropout problem, a whole
bunch of problems, as a result of this exhibit. But this--
no matter who saw it--gave me the opportunity to express
what I'd been feeling. That's all I can think to say right
at the moment. Could be more later.
54
TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE
SEPTEMBER 9, 1990
MASON: Right now I want to finish up talking about your
post-Chouinard [Art Institute], pre-Watts [Towers Arts
Center] years, because you were saying yesterday that even
though you didn't feel that you were an artist, you were
still trying to find out what was going on in the art scene
in L.A. and that you were going to galleries on La Cienega
[Boulevard] . I just wanted to ask, what kinds of things
did you see that made an impression on you in the
galleries? Were there any black artists in the galleries,
or did you--? Well, I'll just leave it at that,
[laughter] You can start there.
PURIFOY: I wasn't particularly impressed with anything. I
just wanted to be knowledgeable about what was happening in
Los Angeles. I'm trying to [recall], through
interpretation of who I thought I was at the time, what was
my idea and attitude toward what I was looking at. Was I
primarily interested in art in order to be intelligent
about what was happening, or was I really interested in
becoming an artist at the time? Working at department
stores, being a window trimmer, was reasonably
gratifying. I was receiving a fairly good salary, and I
was treated well on the job. I had twelve suits, and I
wore a different one every day. I was doing pretty good, I
55
thought .
But vacation time came one year, after being there for
nine years, and I felt comfortable at home fidgeting around
the newly decorated studio with nothing in it. So I
started working on some collages, which was something that
I enjoyed doing, I thought. After a while I decided I
didn't want to go back to work, so I called and said that I
wanted another month's leave. They said if I didn't come
back I was fired. So I got fired. I'd saved some money in
the savings plan at the Broadway, so I thought I'd spend
all my money just hanging around the house and trying to
fiddle with art and so forth. Fortunately, a friend of
mine moved from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., and left
me all of his art equipment, including the easel.
MASON: Who was that? Was this John Smith, the designer
that befriended you?
PURIFOY: I'll have to think up his name and tell you
later. But anyhow, that gave me the impetus to actually
begin to do art, because I had some equipment to work
with. So I started out by doing collages. I was
reasonably pleased with what I was doing.
MASON: What did the collages look like?
PURIFOY: They had African overtones. An abstract figure
of a warrior with spear and shield was the first one I
did. The second one I did was oriental. The third one I
56
did was something else and something else. It kind of
represented a universal concept of what I call an art
motif. The reason I did an African motif is that it just
occurred to me to do an African motif. It didn't
particularly have anything to do with my being black as
such, except I wanted to express in art I thought at that
time--that early time--the universal conscience, which has
enabled me to do something in African and oriental and so
forth. The second year the money ran out, so I started
doing janitorial work at nighttime in order to have my
daytimes to work in. And by that time I got called to
Watts, I think. [tape recorder off]
MASON: This is 1964?
PURIFOY: Yeah, I think so. You asked me how did the
pieces look, and I had begun to describe how they looked in
terms of essence. But more specifically, I had utilized
found objects. So the very first things I made as
collages-- Or actually not collages as such. They were
assemblages made of found objects. In the case of these
first pieces, they were small objects that seemed to
represent what I wanted to represent, such as the shield,
the spear, and all, and the African motif and everything.
They were objects that looked like a shield or a spear,
etc. , as was the case in most of my things over the
years .
57
I mentioned yesterday about how the Watts Towers
Coitunittee [Conunittee to Save Simon Rodia's Towers in
Watts], who owned the Watts Towers, had employed a person
to go to Watts and try to create some happenings around the
Watts Towers. Her name was Eve Echelman, and she heard
about me. I went out and thought it was okay if I started
working there. There was another person in the community,
who was, I think, teaching school in one of the elementary
schools, whose name was Sue Welch. Sue Welch and I began
to explore the community in terms of designing an art
program in a house that was rented by the Watts Towers on
107th Street, just a stone's throw from the towers
themselves. We worked for weeks on end trying to recruit
youth to come to the towers to experience the programs that
we were going to design. So after many weeks and on to
months, we had designed a program utilizing all of the
resources that we could find, such as the youth programs,
and there were some moneys to support art programs.
MASON: State money?
PURIFOY: Yeah, state and federal dollars. We wrote
proposals to get these moneys, both as salaries for our
people and for equipment and so forth. I also ran across a
person who gave a lot of assistance, whose name is Judson
Powell. So Judson Powell, Sue, and myself became the team
to create an art program in Watts. Eve Echelman did not
58
participate in creating the program. She left the
community for points east and returned in about a year to
see how well we had made out.
I'd like to say that I founded the Watts Towers Arts
Center, which it eventually became, but considering the
help I had in Sue Welch and Judson Powell and Eve Echelman
and others, it was a group effort, I would say. Rather
than single-handedly having created an art project, I would
say that I was a cofounder of the Watts Towers art
school. Considering it is still in existence--and run by
John Outterbridge now and has been for years- -I would say
that it was definitely a group effort that made that little
school possible.
We had two full-time teachers, whose names were Debbie
Brewer and Lucille Krasne. We had programs designed for
kids from age four to late teenagers. The young kids would
come in the morning--those particularly who weren't going
to school--and stay till about nine or ten o'clock, where
they had drawing and painting, finger painting, and so
forth. In the late afternoon, the youths would come from
the general elementary and high schools. After a while, we
created such a vital program that we were actually bulging
at the seams. The little children oftentimes did not want
to go home when it was time to go home, and we had to
escort them. They were kids mostly from the immediate
59
community or 107th Street and elsewhere close by. We also
recruited kids from the schools, and they came for
workshops during school hours. So we were rather busy, for
the most part. Judson and I maintained the facilities,
while Debbie and Lucille conducted the workshops.
We utilized found objects to teach with. Oftentimes
we'd take the children on trips to pick out objects-- junk
and etc. --and bring it back to the towers, to the art
center, to do assemblages and collages and so forth. We
were interested in ascertaining if the children were
interested in utilizing objects as applied to some form of
learning. We learned that it was rather natural and
instinctive for the kids to assemble and disassemble an
object, with the idea of counting the parts and so forth.
So this was a profound discovery for us, which put us onto
a direction which we did not anticipate. That is to say,
art education. [tape recorder off]
MASON: Let's go back to the beginning. Now, who is Eve
Echelman exactly? Was she a part of--? Was this project to
go into Watts to work with the community part of the
California Arts Council, do you know? I mean, why did
somebody get the idea all of a sudden that they wanted to
go to Watts and work with the community in ' 64?
PURIFOY: Well, as I said before, the Watts Towers
Committee had bought the Watts Towers from a man to whom it
60
was left after Simon Rodia took off. He left it in charge
of someone in Watts and went up north somewhere. So a
group of people in Los Angeles formed a committee to
purchase the towers, and that they did. They already had
something of a class going on at the towers, an open-air
project of some nature, where the kids would gather around
and they would do finger painting and collages. But the
towers wanted a more sophisticated program than that, so
they hired Eve Echelman, who was an astute person in
organizing and so forth, to see if she could come to Watts
and drum up some people who could create an art school .
And that she did.
MASON: You said she heard about you. Do you know how she
heard about you?
PURIFOY: Yeah. I was unemployed at the time, meaning that
I was sitting around with art at home, and I was ready to
do a project of this nature. So therefore I accepted
responsibility to do the project.
MASON: Now, what about Judson Powell and Sue Welch? Were
they both artists or what were their backgrounds?
PURIFOY: Judson Powell was a musician, and Sue was a
school teacher. They were just people available who agreed
to work on the project with me. I didn't care whether they
were artists or not. That wasn't my concern. My reason
for selecting them was, first, they were available and.
61
second, they were dependable and, thirdly, I figured we
could work as a team. At the time I wasn't too
discriminating regarding who I got to work, because
actually there was no money as such to pay them with,
except promises. So I figured if we were successful at
organizing our school, there would be moneys to be paid.
Eventually they were [paid], and so was I.
MASON: So you only worked with Judson Powell in this
capacity, or was he a personal--?
PURIFOY: Oh, he said-- He asked me-- Judson was a
musician. I think I mentioned that. What was the
question, again?
MASON: Was that your only relationship, or were you also
friends outside of the Watts project?
PURIFOY: Yeah, we were best friends. And so was Sue.
Best friends. I don't think I could have selected a better
combination of people to design this project. I was
surprised at their determination to work to make it
successful, because generally when somebody comes to work
on somebody else's idea, they have a tendency to do what
you say to do and that ' s about all . But these people had a
great deal of enthusiasm for the project, and they
contributed greatly toward its success.
The school became very popular for one reason or
another. Maybe because it was in Watts, I don't know. But
62
it attracted a lot of people. Among them was an educator
called Ron [Ronald H.] Silverman. He was an artist and an
art educator and a research person, so he solicited a grant
from the government to do a study on black youth to
determine-- What was his objective? Let me check that
out. [tape recorder off] I don't recall the objective of
the program, but it had to do with the learning process
connected with art education of some nature. This I'll
find out later. The name of the project was "The Aesthetic
Eye," and that was around 1950. I'm sorry I don't have the
correct date here. They have August 1976 here, but the
project was actually done in 1964, or begun in 1964. So
we'll have to straighten that out if there's any problem
with that.
MASON: You said that suddenly you found out about
children's creative abilities or their abilities to learn
through education. There's a quote, "Education through
creativity is the only way left for a person to find
himself in this materialistic world." That was one of your
quotes from an article about the Watts Towers Center. So
in other words, you weren't trying to train kids to be
professional artists. You were trying to train them simply
to express themselves, or what precisely was the--?
PURIFOY: Well, as a rule, black kids, particularly poor
black kids, have low self-esteem, a low self-image. The
63
object here was to raise the self-image. We believed that
an art experience was transferable to other areas of their
activity and so forth and that if they could come to the
towers and have a good experience, a positive experience,
they could take this experience with them wherever they
go. It improved their self-image, and this would make a
great deal of difference in terms of their ability and
capacity to grasp whatever the objectives were, whether it
was in school or out of school . Does that answer your
question?
MASON: Yeah, that's fine. Well, we can talk about the
Watts riots that happened in August of '65, how you
experienced that and maybe things you remember leading up
to the riots.
PURIFOY: I want to inject here something of interest. I
attended a conference in Maryland--or Washington, D.C., as
the case was--on art education. It was the first
conference held by the NEA [National Endowment for the
Arts] back in 1964. I don't have all the data on that, but
I want to brush up on that for next time, if we can go back
to it.
MASON: Okay.
PURIFOY: I'll just inject it right here because it
interrelates with this "Asthetic Eye" art program that Ron
Silverman did. He was instrumental, I believe, in having
64
me attend this NEA conference in Washington. So I'll write
a note to myself to refer to that next time.
The center of the Watts riot was on 103d Street, and
the Towers Arts Center was on 107th Street. Between the
towers and 103d Street were very few structures. In other
words, the view from the towers, or from the arts center,
as the case was, to 103d Street, where the event took
place, was clear and unobstructed. We could see clearly
what was happening on 107th Street.
Not only could we see clearly what was going on over
there, the looters came right down by the towers with their
booty on their way to their homes. So we were fairly close
to what was happening. We did not have to go to 103d
Street to see what was going on. We could experience this
from our back door of the Watts Towers Arts Center. The
students at the towers--particularly the adolescents--
participated in the riot. Most everyone did. They would
loot and stash their loot in and around the art center. We
permitted that, because this was an extremely unique
experience, and we thought that at least the kids were
still interested in what was happening at the center.
Merely because they brought the loot there was a fact that
this became a place for them, a center for them, a refuge,
so to speak, for them. So we did not discourage it, simply
because we were interested in actually what was going on.
65
and they could bring us news of the events.
MASON: When you say you could see it, what did you see
exactly? Just people running, or what was the--? Was it
something that just exploded all of a sudden, or do you
remember anything leading up to it? I mean, did you
realize at first that something really awful was happening,
or did it just seem like something that may be--? I mean,
what were the sort of first impressions of the riot?
PURIFOY: Well, my impression was that it was certainly a
most devastating event. Had there been just looting, that
would have been one thing. But there was not only looting,
there were huge fires, smoke that permeated the whole
community. Those were the sights that we saw from our back
door. We saw police policing the place, firemen trying to
put out the fires unsuccessfully. We saw crowds and crowds
of people running to and fro. For what reason, now, you
know-- It's just that everybody was excited, and everybody
was participating in the event. Very few people did not
participate. Very few people stood on the sidelines to
watch.
This went on for over a week. And 107th Street, near
the Harbor Freeway-- And the freeway was cluttered with
cars and police. Later, military troops were brought in to
subdue the riot. But none of us worked the first week.
The community was making Molotov cocktails and throwing
66
them at the police and at the buildings and everything.
They were buying nails and tacks from the hardware store
and strewing them on the street to prevent the police and
other motor vehicles from coming into the area. So
actually, the authorities did not know how to handle the
event. It was a unique experience for everybody
involved .
By the second day, the newspapers were full of events
harking back to the possible cause. As it is well known,
the police stopped two people on the freeway and started
molesting them in one way or another, and other people got
involved. So that's actually what started that. But once
the hotbed of poverty-- And my idea was that it was brewing
all the time without us knowing it. There had been an
underground movement such that had there not been an event
that occurred on the freeway that night, there possibly, in
my own opinion, would have been a riot anyhow, because the
people were extremely dissatisfied with conditions.
Poverty money was in the community, but it was mostly
designed to keep the natives quiet, as the case was, or as
the rumor was .
MASON: What is this underground movement?
PURIFOY: Certain revolutionary persons in the community
were already talking riot. It would occur. So this was a
mere vehicle to enable them to implement their own ideas.
67
The [Black] Muslims, who are present today in Watts-- To
what extent they participated is not specific in my mind at
the moment, but SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee] was there. There was general unrest. I don't
think the [John A.] McCone report [California Governor's
Commission on the Los Angeles Riots (1965)] in any way did
justice to what was going on, because they actually did not
know. It was only the few people who were on the inside
and were knowledgeable about what was happening prior to
the riot and what stimulated it as it progressed.
MASON: Now, what about the "66 Signs of Neon"? How was
that conceived, and what was your objective in assembling
that work?
PURIFOY: In late 1964, I broke my leg at the Watts
Towers. I was unloading--or helping to unload--an object
that we were going to put on display, a large wooden object
of a description I don't quite remember. But I broke my
leg, and I was laid up for six weeks. It was an extremely
profound experience, because everybody rallied round, and
while I was in the hospital-- It was really a great
experience to have old friends renew their acquaintance and
make new friends at the same time. I recommend that during
the course of a lifetime everyone should break his left leg
below the knee.
While I was laid up, the Watts Towers had an inkling
68
that they weren't quite satisfied with my attitude
regarding what should be going on at the Watts Towers Arts
Center. They wanted a more sophisticated program. Their
more sophisticated art program was to include people
outside the community, kind of an art school where people
come to matriculate, you know. They wanted to be known as
something profound, some advanced art school of some
echelon, I don't know what. It made me very unhappy about
their attitude, because they didn't fully realize that that
was Watts. That you can't get to know a community by
having a sophisticated arts school there that did not
include the community. So I thought they were dead wrong,
and I argued with them for hours on end regarding that.
But they seized an opportunity to think of dismissing me
when I broke my leg. So when I returned, there, kicked up
on the desk, wearing a pair of crutches, I found that they
had put a person in my place there in my stead, without
announcing who she was or what she was doing there. It was
up to her to edge me out, as the case was.
So I kind of got the idea that it was time to leave
anyhow. We'd had a very successful two years there. We
had many extremely interesting projects including the whole
community, one of which was outstanding in my mind, where
we painted all the houses on 107th Street. We collected
the paint from the paint stores, and the kids donned their
69
work clothes, and we invited people from outside the
community to come and help and so forth. After painting
all the houses, we washed the street down and had a party
that night and everybody came. The whole community came.
The streets were so crowded we had to spend most of our
time directing traffic. For the open house, as we called
it, we erected a mural outside with some painting and
sculpturing and whatnot. That was the highlight of my
experience there, an extremely profound experience. But I
had a tendency to want to create things and move on, so I
accepted the towers' recommendation that I should retire.
That gave me the idea that the junk that we collected -
three tons of junk that we collected that was in the back
of the Watts Towers Arts Center- -was something to be
utilized. So we began to think about having an art
exhibition. It was at the Markham [Junior] High School,
just a stone's throw from the Watts Towers Arts Center,
where we gave our first arts festival. That was in the
spring of 1965.
70
TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE
SEPTEMBER 22, 1990
MASON: You wanted to talk about the conference that you
attended in Gaithersburg, Maryland, called "Arts and the
Poor." I don't know what you wanted to say specifically
about the conference, but you said it tied into your
experience at the Watts Towers [Arts Center] and your
development of an art education program for the Watts Towers,
PURIFOY: Yeah. Ron [Ronald H.] Silverman--! think he was
professor at Cal State, L.A. [California State University,
Los Angeles] --was instrumental in getting me invited to
Maryland to the first NEA [National Endowment for the Arts]
conference, where we discussed art and the poor. It was a
week-long conference that included educators from all over
the country. There wasn't anything profound concluded as
such, except that Ron Silverman a couple of years later
received a grant to make some studies at the Watts Towers.
I derived a great deal from it simply because it was
my first experience at rubbing elbows with high-powered
educators and art educators. I was already interested in
art education, because I had a feeling that blacks like
myself really didn't necessarily relate to art. It was
removed from their experience. Although blacks have some
profound characteristics in that they have depths of
feeling, this is not applicable to anything at all.
71
Primarily, it was exercised in their spiritual life, rather
than any other experiences.
MASON: Do you remember some of the people that you
interacted with, that you met there, that left you with any
kind of impression? What do you feel overall that the
conference--? Do you think it accomplished what it tried to
accomplish or do you think things were maybe not well
defined enough to accomplish anything?
PURIFOY: It was a new subject. I don't think heretofore
it had been-- There had never been a conference on such a
subject as this. I'm trying to think of a name of someone
else whom I've met there that left an impression on me, but
I can't recall anyone for the time being. Maybe later.
MASON: Actually, I have a quote. I found a pamphlet in
the library that talked about this conference, and I read
that —
PURIFOY: Oh, Katherine Bloom. Some of the directors there
were impressive, one of which was Katherine Bloom. I think
she was head of arts and humanities for the federal
government at the time.
MASON: Well, you're quoted in this pamphlet they put
together about the conference. I don't know if you've ever
seen it. It was put out by the government.
PURIFOY: What year?
MASON: It must have been '67. Does that seem right?
72
PURIFOY: I think the conference was in '67, so it's '66.
Or was it before the [Watts] riot? I think the conference
was-- I don't know about that.
MASON: Yeah, I think it was in '67. You're quoted as
saying, "The whole point of the conference was or ought to
be the salvation of the world, not just the poor, through
self-affirmation on the part of the nominal giver, the
artist or teacher, and the nominal receiver."
PURIFOY: I forgot about that.
MASON: Oh. [laughter] Is that something that you would
still agree with today, that that should have been the
point of the conference?
PURIFOY: Yeah. I've changed radically since then, of
course, but I still feel that it's-- To direct art at the
poor is prejudiced, the same as [acting as] though it belongs
to the elite. That's a form of prejudice also. I don't
think they meant it to be, because they were sincere about
finding some means in education to stimulate poor people.
But they weren't aware that art is about the last thing that
poor people get to. They weren't aware of that. Just like
psychotherapy, which I experienced at the mental hospital in
Los Angeles. Blacks cannot utilize psychotherapy because
it's long-term, and blacks are more susceptible to change in
short-term experiences rather than long-term experiences.
MASON: So as far as their using art, do you think that
73
they were trying to--well, maybe some of the people, not
everybody, but some of the people involved in the
conference- -use art somehow in the ghettos to make poor
people conform to some kind of social norm? Is that what
you're saying?
PURIFOY: Not these people. They were really sincere about
the dropout problem, basically. That's one of the problems
of the poor. No, I have the utmost respect for their
sincerity. However, they were white people and they were
just misguided, that's all.
MASON: Okay. In our last session, we started to talk
about the beginnings of "66 Signs of Neon, " and you
mentioned your leaving the Watts Towers [Arts Center] , the
incident about breaking your leg, and how they kind of took
advantage of your being in the hospital . What happened to
the people you were working with. Sue Welch and Judson
Powell? Did they continue to work there when you left?
PURIFOY: Yeah. They weren't fired. They continued to
work there for several years. We organized Joined for the
Arts in Watts and did the [Watts Summer] Festivals, though
he [Powell] wasn't employed by the Watts Towers Committee
any longer.
MASON: What is Joined for the Arts? What kind of
organization was that? What were your goals and who
belonged to it?
74
PURIFOY: Well, there wasn't a steady membership,
actually. It was an idealistic concept. Our goal was to
build an arts center there on 107th Street, which was
eventually done. But in the interim, we started to manage
"Signs of Neon." We had collected three tons of debris
after the riot. We fashioned it in some kind of a
sculpture and whatnot. That's why we solicited the aid of
six other people. We didn't feel that our expression alone
would be sufficient to communicate through the debris. So
we invited some other artists to come in and cart away some
of the junk and make something for the first festival,
which was at Markham [Junior] High School.
MASON: What were some of the first pieces that you and
Judson made before you called in the other artists?
PURIFOY: We hadn't made anything. This was a part of the
original plan. We just sat down and talked about it and
said, "Here's all the stuff. We've got the time to do it
in because we aren ' t working for the towers anymore . What
would you like to do?" We decided that we'd call in some
more people. Among them were Arthur Secunda, Gordon
Wagner- -
^4AS0N: Max Neufeldt?
PURIFOY: Yeah, Max Neufeldt and Debbie Brewer and two
others there in the magazine. You can get the names out of
the magazine.
75
MASON: Do you want to look through that as we talk about
this?
PURIFOY: Okay. [tape recorder off] The artists were--in
addition to the ones I named- -Leon Saulter and Frank
Anthony. Those were the six, I believe.
MASON: How did you decide on them? Were they friends?
PURIFOY: I don't recall. I don't recall how we came up
with these names.
MASON: No, but I mean you must have seen their work
before. You know, like Gordon Wagner's work? No?
[laughter]
PURIFOY: [laughter] Well, I guess we must have. These
were people who had a reputation for utilizing found
objects, and these were most certainly found objects.
Junk-art sculpture is utilized mostly as assemblage.
Assemblage was very popular at the time. Well, not very
popular, but popular. Since then, it's become extremely
popular and preferable. But at that time, we were kind of
exploring new territory. Of course, the concept was
developed at the beginning of this century by Picasso and
Braque and others. The period was called dada, if you
recall. The history most certainly would include the
period.
MASON: Were you studying that at the time? Because
before, you said that you were interested in art history
76
and kind of familiarized with that.
PURIFOY: I had already graduated from an art school.
MASON: Right. You went to Chouinard [Art Institute].
PURIFOY: So I was reasonably intelligent about art
history. This period particularly appealed to me because I
basically was a craftsman. It's allied with craftsmanship
in wood and metal .
MASON: Is there anything specific about a found object
that has kind of been used and you're recycling it? Is
there something specific about junk that appeals to you
aesthetically?
PURIFOY: Yes, yes. First, it's easily accessible. It's
available, and that's for certain. Everything is
recyclable here. But in large cities, junk is not often
disposed of in junk piles, so to speak, at garbage dumps.
It's exposed out oftentimes in communities that don't care.
MASON: Like Watts, for example. [laughter]
PURIFOY: In Watts it was extremely accessible. Number
two, it relates to poor people. Wherever there are poor
people, there's piles of junk. People bring the junk
there. In Watts, there were mounds of scrap metal all over
the place and defunct foundries where there were piles of
metal and junk. Garbage day was a time when people put
their trash out, but it was often not picked up, and so it
stayed there for weeks. In some places, there was no
77
pickup at all. People would buy furniture and household
appliances cheaply, but they had to throw it away before
they got it paid for. So these are characteristics of poor
people which made it a haven for me- -one who collects
objects.
There's something else about objects that appeals to
me--it stimulates my imagination. I can think to do
something with it, turn it into something else other than
what it was originally designed for.
MASON: Do you feel like you're elevating the object to
art? Elevating junk to the level of art? Is that the way
you look at it?
PURIFOY: Well, Marcel Duchamp founded the concept of "as
is," You're familiar with that, no doubt. "As is," I
think, makes the assemblage legitimate, because many things
that are designed for use--household use and so forth--are
excellent shapes to look at, particularly in the early
American days. People hand made things and contributed a
great deal of thought to the structure. However, when new
things come into being, people throw away the old things,
and these are things that are oftentimes well designed.
Duchamp recognized this and created the concept of "as
is." In other words, he had a tendency to display an
object without doing anything to it and say, "This is okay
like it is. "
78
That also appealed to me in terms of junk art. It
kind of trickles down from "as is" to junk art, because in
assemblage I try to enable the article to remain
identifiable, although it's intertwined with other
objects. The more it becomes identifiable, the more
interest I believe is created around the object, the
complete object d'art.
^4AS0N: Well, let's talk specifically about some of the
pieces in "66 Signs of Neon."
PURIFOY: Okay. The one on the cover here, made of stove-
pipes and--
MASON: Maybe we should identify it. We're looking at Junk
magazine, which was published by "66 Signs of Neon, " but is
that just another name for Joined for the Arts in Watts?
PURIFOY: Well, it was published by us, but it was
underwritten by American Cement Corporation of Los
Angeles. There should be a date somewhere here indicating
when it was published, but I don't see it.
MASON: That's all right.
PURIFOY: It's around 1968 or '69. This object on the fly
sheet, on the front cover, is composed of stovepipes- -two
joints of stovepipes standing about thirty-six inches tall,
with a part of a roof of tar paper and tin mounted on its
peak, on a pedestal. There's a brace--a piece of metal
brace there--to hold it up. It's called Breath of Fresh
79
Air. I don't know why. [laughter] But that's one I did
first off.
MASON: Oh, that's the first one you did?
PURIFOY: I don't know.
MASON: Oh, okay.
PURIFOY: When I say "first off," it was among the first
ones we did. I don't know whether it was the absolute
first one or not. Turning the page, we come to Sir
Watts. Sir Watts took on its own identity, and I don't
think there was anybody who did not like Sir Watts upon
sight. Some feel that it's done tongue in cheek simply
because it's called Sir Watts. It was said that I have
something of a sense of humor about my work. I don't know.
MASON: Well, that seems poignant in some ways, too,
because where the heart should be there ' s kind of an
opening with safety pins coming out, and it's sort of cut
away. Then for the face there's a purse, which I've seen
opened in some reproductions, so it seems to be sort of
saying something about vulnerability, even though it's all
metal. There seems to be an element of vulnerability about
it. Is that something that you had in mind?
PURIFOY: No, it was kind of a tongue-in-cheek object, a
pun, more or less. I enjoyed doing it. It was something
that-- The finish on it--on the surface and all--was
extremely unique, the paint and whatnot. The objects that
80
represent the arms and the head and the torso consisted of
drawers and so forth. Juxtapositions just occurred to me,
and it worked. It worked quite satisfactorily as a
representation of the human figure. Naming it Sir Watts
was the tongue-in-cheek concept that I oftentimes can
muster.
There's an interesting story connected with Sir
Watts. During my exhibit at the black arts museum
[California Afro-American Museum] on Expo[sition
Boulevard] , the curator there was so anxious to find and
display Sir Watts. I was of little or no help because I
didn't know where Sir Watts was. She asked me if I could
make another one, and I flipped out, because it's virtually
impossible to duplicate junk art. You have to find the same
objects; you have to be in the same mood. [laughter] And
I oftentimes chuckle to myself that someone would be so
naive. [laughter]
MASON: When you say you don't know where it is, you sold
it but you didn't keep track of it?
PURIFOY: That's right, yeah. The U.S. Office of
Information solicited it once and sent it to Germany. They
sent it back to the owner, and that's the last I heard of
it. I wish now I did know where it was, at least to make
it accessible to the public.
The next page of the Junk art magazine shows one of
81
these what we call "signs of neon." "Signs of Neon" is a
little confusing unless one is aware of where the exhibit
got its title from. The exhibit got its title from the
drippings of neon signs upon the ground, formulating
crystal-like meltings, mixing with the sand and dirt,
formulating extremely odd shapes. What Judson and I did
was simply take the shapes out of the sand, brush them off,
mount them on something, and sell them. They went like
hotcakes. Another interesting--
MASON: Who were you selling them to? Do you remember?
PURIFOY: Well, yes. Gregory Peck owns one. He came to
the festival at Markham in '66. He was then representing
the NEA, and he participated in some way in deciding where
the grants go. He ultimately provided a grant for me to
ship "Signs of Neon" to Washington, D.C. He came to my
house and brought a lot of people with him who were on the
committee. That's how he happened to know about the
exhibit at Markham.
^4AS0N: I was just wondering who was collecting these kinds
of pieces then, since you said they weren't as fashionable
then. I just wondered who would be interested in those
kinds of things.
PURIFOY: Well, we had no problem in selling them once
people understood where the source was from whence it
came.
82
Another interesting object on this page is the
Phoenix. The Phoenix is simply a piece of bent-up metal
mounted on a twelve- foot pole with a base to enable it to
stand up. We called it the Phoenix because it looked like
a bird.
MASON: Who was this done by?
PURIFOY: This piece of sculpture on this page [Max
Untitled] --an excellent piece of sculpture, made of heavy
metal--was done by Max Neufeldt.
MASON: And this one, the Phoenix, was done by--
PURIFOY: The Phoenix was a group effort, Judson and
myself.
MASON: How did that work? Did you guys talk about what
you wanted to do beforehand?
PURIFOY: No. We seldom talked about what we wanted to
do. We would look at an object, segregate it from the pile
of junk, study it for a while, and say--one of us, more or
less; it didn't matter which one was first-- "Oh, I know
what that looks like." And then we'd proceed to assemble
it. It took only minutes, for the most part.
MASON: Now, that's by Arthur Secunda.
PURIFOY: Yeah, this is called City. Arthur Secunda had
collected many objects embedded in plastic. A very
interesting concept.
MASON: All round, many of them.
83
PURIFOY: This is called Watts Baby, I think. I don't
remember. Race Baby it's called, by Ruth Saturensky, who
was one of the artists that we solicited that I forgot the
name of. That is the only flat piece I think we had, only
wall piece. One of the few wall pieces, I'd say. It's not
the only one. It has photographs of black kids in it, more
or less, and you could call it a montage, I guess.
On the next page is a sculpture by Neufeldt called
Spoons, one by myself called Sudden Encounter- -
MASON: Is this glass?
PURIFOY: Sudden Encounter is, yes, a windshield mounted on
a crosstie upright, with a-- What do you call that? A
flit-gun.
MASON: A flit-gun?
PURIFOY: Uh-huh. For mosquitos.
MASON: Oh, I don't know what that is. Was this broken
glass in any way a reference to Duchamps, his Large Glass
[The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even] or--?
PURIFOY: "As is"? You see, there are only two objects
here, so that's as close to an "as is" as I'll ever get. I
have a big piece of rubber about six inches thick and about
twenty by twenty square, pure rubber, weighing about 150
pounds.
Barrel and Plow was an interesting shape. It's simply
a beer barrel and a plow, mounted on a table.
84
MASON: Oh, so it's stationary. It doesn't move.
PURIFOY: No, no.
MASON: Was there any idea that you were trying to--? Maybe
a reference to your childhood?
PURIFOY: No. The shape just appealed to me. I oftentimes
result in pure, unadulterated design, with no overtones
whatsoever, with no tongue-in-cheek or anything. I prefer
it. Maybe later we could talk about that in reference to
some of my protest pieces, if you're interested.
MASON: Well, I notice that round shapes often appear in
your work in some significant place. Is the circle
something that--?
PURIFOY: No. No. No, it's just a basic shape that I
often use.
MASON: It's my imagination. Okay.
PURIFOY: Yeah. But no particular significance, except
it's an art form. I mean, it's what artists do.
MASON: This is The Sink, which is another group effort by
David Mann, yourself, and Judson Powell.
PURIFOY: We often did things together because we wanted
the community to relate to each other. Poor people--and
particularly black people--have a tendency to not want to
relate to each other on an equal level. We are inclined to
be selfish and vindictive, often childlike, as the case may
be. Children are often cruel. However, I imposed a great
85
deal of poverty upon myself to learn about blacks. That
sounds strange coming from me. But I went to Watts not
being quite colored. I had a lot of white characteristics.
MASON: Like what? [laughter]
PURIFOY: First, I was overeducated . I had three academic
degrees. And nobody in Watts had a degree hardly, even
from high school. So in order to understand a community, I
had to be like them, I thought. I had one pair of shoes at
the time. I never wore a suit. I didn't own one.
However, prior to Watts, I had a dozen suits or more. I
never wore a tie. In fact, I tried to emulate the people
of Watts in order to understand their plight. Their whole
direction here is justifiable, so to speak. [People say]
they're selfish and uncooperative, and we were talking
about The Sink as a group effort. It is often said that
blacks spend enough money in America to have their own
businesses and whatnot, and we can be independent. We
don't have to depend on white people to assist us.
Considering how many blacks are on welfare and whatnot, we
thought the group effort would demonstrate how blacks could
cooperate with each other and become independent. The
justification for selfishness is all poor people are
self ish--it ' s not just blacks--because they're the have-
nots. When you don't have, you want, and in the wanting
you oftentimes do not get, and therefore you internalize
86
all of this woe and become ostracized.
MASON: Well, maybe some people would argue that poor
people-- Maybe not in urban areas. You know, to talk about
poor in urban areas and in rural areas is to talk about two
different things. Because sometimes when you think about
the rural poor, they don't have anything, but it seems that
they're always willing to share a meal with somebody.
PURIFOY: Well, overtly that's quite true. On payday--
payday meaning when the welfare check comes--the neighbors
invite me in for a drink of gin early in the morning.
Despite the fact that I don't start drinking till
nightfall, I would take a drink in order to be sociable. I
wanted to win their favor. So in the morning when I'd take
the children from the center-- (Because they didn't want to
go home. They liked it at the center so much, till we had
to carry them home sometimes on our backs.) If the welfare
check had come, generally mama had a pint of gin on the
coffee table, and so she was rather generous in offering me
a drink of gin. I didn't even drink gin, really. I
preferred bourbon. Yes, however, blacks collect brown
stamps. They expect to be paid back. So, you see, that is
not the generosity that we like to feel here. Maybe you
don't agree with that, where you come from. I'm talking
about American blacks, American poor. I'm not talking
about European poor. I don't know what they do.
87
MASON: I don't either.
PURIFOY: But that's where blacks have an excellent
memory. They remember everything they do for you, and they
expect remuneration. They expect payback. They'll remind
you, "Remember I did thus and so? And it's time to pay
back the favor." So when your check comes-- That's what I
mean. So, yeah, blacks have a tendency to be generous, but
for reasons-- Poor people are exactly what it says, poor,
poor both in spirit and in well-being.
Oh, yes. We were talking about The Sink and the group
effort. The group effort was sustained throughout my art
experience in relationship to doing workshops wherever I
would go. UCLA heard about the group effort and invited me
to participate in one of its festivals, where they also
invited well-known people such as Marcel Marceau and
Buckminster Fuller. Debbie Brewer was there, Judson Powell
was there, and several other people, to stimulate the
building of a large piece of sculpture where any student or
anybody who comes by can participate. The philosophy of
group effort is that I pay attention to what you do on your
side so that I'll balance it off on my side. This
translated into existence as being that I want to get rid
of my selfishness. I want to sense my relationship with
the world at large, you included.
The last page--second to last page--in Junk art
88
magazine is an object called The Train. It's a train
mounted between a freestanding structure and a lot of
objects juxtaposed on four sides. It's said to be a piece
of sculpture with a pipe hanging out the top. It was
featured in a brochure on the exhibit we had in Washington,
D.C., in 1969, I believe, '68 or '69. Walter Hopps was the
curator [of twentieth-century painting and sculpture] of
the Washington modern art gallery [Gallery of Modern Art] ,
I believe. We showed there in 1959, I believe, or '68. I
think you asked me earlier to say something regarding what
effect art had on a community, and I happened to think of--
89
TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO
SEPTEMBER 22, 1990
PURIFOY: Before we went out of state, we exhibited "Signs
of Neon" at nine universities from '66 to '69. We made
available to the spectators a pad and pencil to make
comments. And we kept the comments for years. We had
stacks of them made by students who either liked or did not
like the exhibit. The things that we displayed were
extremely expressive. It isn't particularly evident in
this magazine, because this magazine shows specific
objects, specific pieces of sculpture on one page. But we
assembled the exhibit in a large hall, and it was well done
and quite colorful and exciting to look at. We always
entertained crowds of people. I remember particularly at
[University of California] Berkeley — We were there for
nineteen days during some of the hottest [most turbulent]
times on campus. For that reason, and others, no doubt, we
had crowds of people coming through all the time. When we
took it to Washington [D.C.], they wanted us to stay there
and utilize their junk, too, and make sculptures. Of
course we refused, because we were doing great like we were
in Los Angeles.
The last one is Sunflowers, I think it's called, by
Debbie Brewer. I wanted to mention that, because Debbie
participated in "Signs of Neon" by making things and
90
sending them to us. We sold lots of stuff, we'd send the
money back, and we would make some more stuff. So we
always had sixty-six pieces to display, but there were
different pieces from time to time because we made sales.
That's how we existed, all six of us. Particularly Judson
and me.
We had some horrible-- I would just mention this in
passing. We never got to show at any of the university
galleries. We always showed in the student union hall or
someplace like that. And they had terrible facilities,
sleeping quarters and so forth. They were just terrible.
People felt sorry for us because we complained a lot and
put us up in their homes. I remember particularly, at
Berkeley, again, a patron from Los Angeles came up and saw
how deplorable our conditions were, so she put us up at the
Hilton hotel for a whole week. And we were delighted at
that.
MASON: Who was that?
PURIFOY: Lillian Testie was her name. She was the
daughter of a well-known piano maker. I don't recall which
one.
MASON: But you say she was an arts patron, so to speak?
PURIFOY: Yes.
MASON: Why do you think they would bring the show and not
give you good facilities?
91
PURIFOY: They were just concerned about activities, you
know, rotating activities on campus, that's all. You're
familiar with that. Anything that they felt would interest
the students was their job. Where we slept and all was
secondary to the exhibit. The exhibit was excellent. It
was really good. A wonderful exhibit, professionally
done. I was a curator and didn't know it.
MASON: I just want to ask about one comment that I read.
When the show went to Washington, there was a reviewer for
the Washington Sunday Star who said he was really
disappointed with the show because it didn't evoke for him
the excitement or the horror or whatever of the Watts
riots.
PURIFOY: The eyes of the beholder. We had the objects
there. It was just done in such a fashion that it was
really creative. Every object was extremely conducive to
creativity. You know, done well. The group we selected to
do the things were excellent artists. There must have been
some positive comments.
MASON: Well, he said that even though it didn't evoke the
riots for him, his attention was finally drawn to the
objects as objects, so that's kind of where he left off.
PURIFOY: That was our intention.
MASON: Yeah. But he didn't quite get that.
PURIFOY: We didn't intend to provoke.
92
MASON: Because he wanted like a slide show.
PURIFOY: It wasn't intended to provoke. I didn't have
that in mind at any rate. I don't know about the other
two. I don't think we even discussed this. But the pieces
were so well done, and done in such good taste, that it
became an assemblage show of terrific art. Everyone said
that. As mean as I was, I did not care whether people
reacted in a hostile way or not. We just wanted their
reaction, that's all. We didn't care. We didn't want to
excite a riot or anything. That wasn't the object
whatsoever. But had it excited a riot, you know, so what?
MASON: Is there anything else you want to add about the
"66 Signs"?
PURIFOY: No, I think that just about covers it. But the
old stuff-- I can't think of any other piece I'd like to
speak about .
MASON: Okay. We can talk about the workshops that you
did, your teaching experience, from '66 through '73, and
the works that you were doing in that period.
PURIFOY: The workshops?
MASON: Well, your teaching experience at UCLA, UC
[University of California] Davis, Immaculate Heart College.
PURIFOY: And particularly [University of California] Santa
Cruz. I was more consistent with Santa Cruz. I was a
visiting teacher for four years intermittently. I want to
93
also mention two people who were extremely instrumental in
furthering my career. They were Dr. Page Smith and his
wife Eloise [Smith] . I developed a lifelong friendship
with them. I was visiting recently.
^4AS0N: They were both teachers at UC Santa Cruz?
PURIFOY: Page was the provost there, and he resigned after
twelve years and took to writing history books. [tape
recorder off]
^4AS0N: So we were talking about Page and Eloise Smith at
Cowell College, right, at UC Santa Cruz?
PURIFOY: Yeah.
MASON: You said they helped your career? How so?
PURIFOY: We were in San Francisco in 1966, I believe, when
it was suggested that we go to Cowell College at Santa Cruz
for some reason or other. I don't recall. But I ended up
there one evening, and we stayed so late till it was
suggested that we spend the night . We didn ' t have anywhere
to sleep, and Eloise, Page's wife, offered to put us up,
especially me. She got familiar with our philosophy,
having seen photographs of our work, and ultimately she got
to see the works herself in Berkeley. She talked Page
Smith into inviting me to do a workshop at Santa Cruz. We
did a workshop commemorating their second, third, or fourth
anniversary from the time the school had opened- -Cowell
College. It was new at the time. Page had come from UCLA,
94
as a historian there, to be the provost at Cowell
College. That's how I got to meet up with Page and Eloise,
and they invited me back each year for four consecutive
years to do a workshop in the spring.
The workshop consisted of two days a week, and I was
paid extremely well. It was great. One day a week we
would do sculpture in Page Smith's garage. (They were
living on campus. ) And the next day we would have
classroom discussion of how art related to education.
MASON: Was this for art majors?
PURIFOY: No, this was for anyone. So I had two classes a
week and about thirty students per class. We went into
some heavy details about art and art education and how it
interrelates with humans. I was never interested in art as
a thing in and of itself. So we were talking about art in
relationship to, but not art per se. The one day we'd do
art would demonstrate how within oneself there's a creative
process going all the time, and that it's merely expressed
in an object called art. But one's life should also
encompass the creative process. We were trying to
experiment with how you do that, how you tie the art
process in with existence. We called it art and
humanities.
MASON: Were you working with ideas that you learned at the
Watts Towers?
95
PURIFOY: Yes. It was a carryover. I was primarily
pushing "Signs of Neon" at the time, so it was convenient
for me to take out a few weeks or a few months and do a
workshop in Santa Cruz.
MASON: We can talk about some of the pieces that you did
after the "66 Signs of Neon." Do you remember the first
piece you did after? Or did you constantly use the
material that you had found there and incorporate it into
other works?
PURIFOY: Eventually "Signs of Neon" came back from some
place or other, maybe Tennessee or Alabama. It got down as
far as Tennessee, I believe. I don't recall. It's listed
there, I think, in the resume of where it went down that
way. I didn't go with it. But from Washington, D.C., the
exhibit traveled. About 1969 it came back in a truck just
about in the same shape it was when we found it in Watts,
in the smoldering embers of the Watts riot. In other
words, that was the end of "Signs of Neon. " It was back in
its original state: Junk!
^4AS0N: I'm sorry. Are you saying that the pieces weren't
taken care of?
PURIFOY: Right. Right.
MASON: Okay, I just wanted it spelled out for slow
people. [laughter]
PURIFOY: Oh, no, I just wasn't being too exacting. I was
96
trying to be poetic, I guess. [laughter]
However, there was still some demand for the
exhibit. Some people wanted to create a black museum or
something. There was a lot of talk about utilizing an old
fire station in central Los Angeles to house the exhibit.
I entertained the idea, because we could always refurbish
it or whatnot. But nothing ever came of it, so it just
deteriorated in somebody's garage someplace in Watts.
That's the last I heard of it.
Gordon Wagner was concerned about his pieces that
didn't get sold. I didn't get any flak from Arthur Secundo
or Neufeldt. I think Ruth Saturensky was a little bit
unhappy about the condition of her piece, but all in all
that was just about the end of "Signs of Neon."
I had to go and do something else, so I gave up art
and went to work in a mental institution. I said "work, "
not [be a] patient, work. I got a job at Central [City]
Community Mental Health Facility [Los Angeles], where I was
able to utilize my art experiences as well as my degree in
social service administration. So I experimented with
utilizing art as a tool for a change, for mental health.
MASON: Okay, so that was '73 to '76 you did that.
PURIFOY: From '71 to '75.
MASON: But before you did that, you had done some other
work, it seems. I have some things that are dated before
97
then, a few untitled pieces of totem with feathers and fur,
slippers. [tape recorder off] You wanted to talk some
more about the Watts Summer Festivals.
PURIFOY: Yeah. Here's a brochure that you might be
interested in which describes actually how sufficient we
were and how adequate we were as curators. Here is a
brochure we did in 1969 or '70, I believe. Inside, there
are labels for the artist to cut out and paste on their
works and so forth. It gives you information regarding who
is eligible, community rules, registration, prize awards,
sales of works, art auctions, and other categories.
Usually, I would open up the place where the artists would
drop their works off two weeks before the exhibit.
Now, why would I do that two weeks before? Nobody
else does, of course. Well, first, I had the time, and
second, it was an excellent opportunity to sit down and
talk with the artists as they brought their works in and
see how they were thinking and actually how they were
doing. So I became familiar with all the community of
artists by allocating this time before each festival. I
did this nine consecutive years, and I got very familiar
with what was going on. Also, we would stimulate the
artists to do work expressly for the festival. Not only
did we do that, we went around to all the schools and
collected works by the students.
98
MASON: You mean the art schools or the public schools?
PURIFOY: Public schools. We also were interested in
collecting works from anyone, all students. At the time.
Chicanes only were in East L.A. They weren't all over the
place like they are now. So we consistently went over
there and spoke with their teachers and collected their
works and displayed them. As results of that, we
stimulated a lot of kids to do art. Oftentimes, the
teacher would encourage them to do art expressly for the
festival. So we got to stimulate quite a number of people
in our community, thus making us really community
artists. We weren't artists per se, like artists who close
themselves up in a studio. We really got out on the
streets, leading the people.
MASON: What kind of art were you commissioning? Was it
assemblage art, or did you have any preference?
PURIFOY: Oh, no. We didn't discriminate whatsoever. Any
kind of art they brought was great. We had a lot of
categories, as you see in this brochure. We picked people
like [John] Outterbridge, Alonzo Davis, and Dale [Davis],
his brother, to do the judging and whatnot, people that the
community respected.
I think calling ourselves community artists harks back
to the beginning of art in Cleveland, where at the Karamu
House, as you recall, they were practicing community art
99
for years. They were usually associated with other
activities in a building that was concerned about social
welfare as well as the health of the community at large.
And invariably they would include art, both performing and
visual arts. So I think I took the cue from having lived
in Cleveland for a while.
MASON: Oh, you did? Did you know Curtis Tann, who came
out here?
PURIFOY: Yeah, he came from Karamu House. So community
art has a certain belief system. It doesn't believe in art
for art's sake. So you can imagine the problem one would
have in an elite community like Los Angeles with this kind
of belief system. And yet we were consistent with our
idea. We didn't have any confrontations until we started
dealing with the [Los Angeles City] Board of Education and
the state [California] Arts Council, when we were concerned
with art education and art as a tool for learning. You
asked a question once about whether or not I influenced the
artists or the artists influenced me or whatnot. Well, I
think I was more popular among the artists than I was among
the patrons, because I always had something to say about
art. At the time, I recall, we didn't verbalize much about
art. We insisted that art speak for itself. But my
attitude toward that concept was that it was elite and that
poor people could not afford to feel that something was in
100
and of itself because of their basic needs and
dependency. So what I was insisting upon verbally, as well
as attracted to convey it in my work through the group
effort, was that it's an elitist concept to feel that art
is in and of itself art. It is not in and of itself,
because it interrelates with the world at large. We tried
to say this in "Signs of Neon."
MASON: In other words, art as just an aesthetic experience
isn't enough. It isn't enough to just explore color and
line.
PURIFOY: It doesn't reach blacks at all. It excludes
blacks and poor, and it just burned me up. Art is the most
uncontaminated discipline existing in the world, and there
was excellent opportunity to interrelate it with even
poverty.
MASON: Now, you started a theater group, too, in the
sixties. How did that work with--?
PURIFOY: Yeah, because I was interested in theater from
college. Even from high school, I think. I'm not sure. I
had a theater group in a little town I worked in called
Tuscaloosa [Alabama] , and we traveled around the community
doing theater pieces. So when I went to Watts, I met Steve
Kent, and he was from Watts.
MASON: I'm sorry, who was that?
PURIFOY: Steve Kent. He was a UCLA drama graduate at the
101
time. Around the early part of creating the Watts Towers
Arts Center, Steve was one of the people who came to assist
us in designing a program. Included was drama. It wasn't
the kind of drama that you get on the stage- -say your
piece, bow, and leave. It was improvisation. You know,
you just create the concept on the spot. I thought this
was an excellent media to relate to the community, so I
encouraged it. Steve developed a wonderful theater with
the young people in the community, as the case was.
Finally, Steve came to us and said, "You know, we'd like to
have a theater. I want my own." I said, "Okay, let's do
it." So we went to Beverly Hills and created a theater.
MASON: What was in Beverly Hills?
PURIFOY: A theater.
MASON: There was a stage, you mean?
PURIFOY: Improv. Yeah. It was housed on Robertson
Boulevard in Beverly Hills. We had a lot of help, a lot of
volunteers. I happened to check here in this book when you
spoke. It was called the Company Theater on Robertson
Boulevard in Los Angeles. They had a repertory group and
they put on two or three plays a year. They also traveled
to the festival in Edinburgh in 1967. Despite moving out
of the community, Steve Kent continued to work with the
Watts Towers Arts Center theater group. The name was
changed to the Improv Theater, I think, and finally they
102
folded up about three to four years ago.
MASON: So there were young people involved in all aspects,
then? In set design and costume design? Or was it more
minimal than that?
PURIFOY: Well, no. It wasn't that kind of theater. See,
improv pretends you've got a background, pretends this is a
bedroom, pretends this is a living room, and there are no
props. That was the beauty of improv, that the audience
has to pretend that-- [pointing to photograph] That's Steve
Kent.
MASON: Do you remember what kinds of themes people usually
dealt with?
PURIFOY: Themes?
MASON: Yeah, in the skits.
PURIFOY: Pregnancy, teenage kids' concepts, jealousy,
intrigue, sex, every subject that teenagers are interested
in. Oh, I want to mention also, I don't think we could go
past the improvisational theater unless we mentioned Joyce
Weddolf, who was a volunteer who assisted the "Signs of
Neon" and the theater a great deal. She was our resource
person, publisher, etc. You asked me to name names. I
just happened to think of that name.
MASON: Okay. Could we talk about some of your work?
PURIFOY: Uh-huh. What work?
MASON: Well, this work after Watts and before 1970.
103
PURIFOY: I'm not too clear, except I was working all the
time. Even when I was working with "Signs of Neon, " every
time I'd come home, any spare moment, I was doing
something.
MASON: Was the material still stuff from the riots that
you had stored, or did you look for new materials to use?
PURIFOY: No, once we used up that material--and we used it
all up in "Signs of Neon" pretty much--we had to find new
sources for found objects, for junk. That's available, as
I said before, in Watts and other places in Los Angeles.
As you can see, this [untitled] piece here was made into a
postcard. Samella Lewis did that [i.e., had it printed on
a postcard], and that's one of the things that she did
best, I guess.
MASON: You said she bought that piece for the Museum of
African American Art. Or was this for Contemporary Crafts,
the gallery?
PURIFOY: No, she bought it for herself to own. She liked
it, you know, and hung it on her wall. She thought it was
great. I hung it up for her because it was heavy.
MASON: Do you remember what kinds of ideas you were
exploring in this piece? It seems like it was more layered
than some of your other pieces.
PURIFOY: What's that word?
MASON: Layered. Like there are objects on top of one
104
another, whereas- -
PURIFOY: Oh, juxtaposed. Okay, I've got you. Want me to
say something about that?
MASON: Yeah. [laughter]
PURIFOY: Well, as you know, I'm well aware that the
dadaists utilized juxtaposition like no artists ever did or
ever will do, no doubt. If you'll recall, the shapes of
things that came out of that period, both done by Braque
and Picasso, were a great deal of juxtaposition, one thing
piled on top of another to create depth, etc. Because what
they were protesting most of all was perspective, you know,
drawing in perspective to create depth. They were in
opposition to that altogether. So in order to achieve
depth, they would juxtapose one object on top of another
and therefore achieve depth without perspective. They
thought it was more honest to do it that way, and so did
I. So I got that from dada. You'll notice in this piece
here I did not discriminate. Whatever my hands came to, I
put it in there. If you can observe, here is an old shoe,
a shovel --
MASON: An umbrella.
PURIFOY: See the shovel in the left-hand corner here?
Right here? Here's a handkerchief or a scarf and more
shoes, more shoes, and wood objects. I didn't have a
tendency-- The less I discriminated, the more successful I
105
became in doing junk art.
MASON: Well, shoes are an object that reappears in your
work. Like in these two totems, you have shoes and
shoehorns, you know, and slippers.
PURIFOY: They were just accessible. That's what's
available. I use anything that's available. I think
that's part of the creative process, that you don't
discriminate. I do more discriminating now than I ever did
before.
MASON: I'm looking now at the show that you did with
Bernie Casey, Betye Saar, John Outterbridge, and Benny
Andrews, curated by Samella Lewis. You have an untitled
metal sculpture with kind of an obvious sexual pun, I
guess. I don't know. It's a kind of anthropomorphic
shape. What were you trying to convey about sexuality in
the piece, or what kind of ideas were you--? Because I was
saying that a lot of your metal sculptures seem to stand on
legs, which gives them a kind of anthropomorphic quality.
So how are your metal sculptures--? I mean, besides the
fact that you're blending the materials together through
some process, you're-- [tape recorder off]
106
TAPE NnjMBER: V, SIDE ONE
SEPTEMBER 22, 1990
PURIFOY: That piece of sculpture, incidentally, Alonzo
[Davis] sent it to San Francisco, I believe to participate
in some kind of metal exhibit.
MASON: We're still talking about the untitled metal
sculpture with the phallic symbol or penis attached to it,
in the show by Samella [Lewis] .
PURIFOY: Well, I went through a period where I did a lot
of them. I did some four- foot penises all juxtaposed.
They never got shown, however, but I did them anyhow,
papier-mache and whatnot. They were real, you know,
actually real, four feet tall and ten inches in diameter.
I think those are the first things that I did with some
idea of self-expression. Usually, I didn't look at art as
self-expression. I didn't give a damn. I keep repeating
that my object was to utilize art as a vehicle to gain my
self -certainty. But doing those large penises, and
projecting the one on that piece of sculpture that you're
looking at, was a discovery of something about me I've been
saying all the time. This was an introspective exploration
of an attempt to improve one's inner self.
I learned that I was sexually precocious, and it
becomes evident in my long spiel about my childhood. If
there's anything in art that connects with my childhood,
107
it's when I got the nerve to express myself in this way,
with these large penises. But it was many years after
that--after making those pieces--that I had the opportunity
to actually express myself in a more profound physical
way. One who's sexually precocious turns out to be--
whether he or she knows it or not- -erotic.
So I spent a lot of time thinking about my eroticism
and trying to overcome, in one way or another, what rode on
top of it, religion and Christianity. There was no getting
it off through art, which I can testify to. I did not
receive any great, lasting gratification from doing art.
While I was doing it I was thoroughly gratified, but that's
what's contagious about art: you just have to keep doing
it to receive the same gratification. That's what becomes
addictive. However, when I discovered I was precocious, I
looked around for such a person who was also precocious,
with the idea of signing a contract. This was the way in
which I overcame my sexual precociousness, if that's the
right expression. It wasn't through art.
MASON: When you say "signing a contract," you mean an
actual marriage contract?
PURIFOY: A verbal contract.
MASON: Oh, okay.
PURIFOY: A verbal contract. A verbal contract, like "just
describe to me what satisfies you, and I'll describe to you
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what satisfies me, and let's make an exchange." Two years
of that enabled me to overcome. I was going to
pornographic movies up till then.
MASON: Yeah, well, there was a lot of that in the
sixties. You know, the free love period and a lot of
people exploring their sexuality. Did you think that you
were somehow different from those people?
PURIFOY: I didn't know about those people. I just knew
about me. I didn't know why they were doing it. But I
most certainly took advantage of it. Being the person that
I am, though, I can't take advantage of a situation without
compensating for it. At [University of California] Santa
Cruz, I was thrown in a hotbed of young females, so I took
advantage of the opportunity, but not without paying it
back, paying something back in return.
^4AS0N: You mean to them or to society?
PURIFOY: To them, to them directly. Being that, you know,
"I'm available to you anytime you need a shoulder to cry
on. What are you unhappy about?" Things like that.
Despite my overtness, I experienced some high spiritual
times during that time where communication was
phenomenal. Like an experience I've never had before or
since, where you don't have to say words to communicate.
We really were utilizing art at the time to create a
process to communicate with. And it was extremely
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profound. I can't begin to describe how phenomenal a human
being we became. I did not think it was possible. It's
just like getting religion. I described the [episode of]
Father Divine and the quest for getting religion. Well, I
finally got it, but not in a Christ-like way, another kind
of way that I wasn't familiar with whatsoever. It's when
one soul talks to another and not a word is said, a
phenomenal state of being. I enjoyed that for a long, long
time, three or four years.
MASON: This is when you were still having the oceanic
experience, or was that a part of it?
PURIFOY: I don't know if that was before or after. I
think it was afterward. It was a spillover into-- That was
the aftermath of the oceanic experience, I'm pretty sure,
because I'd already had the Watts experience, so the
oceanic experience phenomenon came during the Watts period.
MASON: Do you feel like that was the first step, maybe, in
getting in touch with who you were or who you wanted to be?
PURIFOY: It was confirmed. It was confirmation. It was
the absolute certainty that I not only was the person that
I admired most, but I was indestructible and I would live
forever. I really believed that. But my life-style
implied that I was already not of this world, so to speak,
although indulging in everything common to the world, like
drinking, smoking, and having sex. But it was done on a
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rather high level of spiritual conununication. Like alcohol
was an ally.
MASON: You say it was an ally?
PURIFOY: Uh-huh. I drank a fifth a day for twenty
years. It did not make me addicted because I quit cold
turkey three years ago, three or four years ago, five,
drinking and smoking. I just started back smoking
yesterday. I have a glass of wine occasionally, great
wine. You can buy it for a dollar a bottle here, and it's
great wine.
MASON: But it's not Thunderbird, right?
PURIFOY: Oh, no. It's great wine, blanc de blanc.
MASON: I asked you about Freudian symbols in your work,
like the shoe and those things, which sometimes can be
construed as Freudian fetish objects.
PURIFOY: No, no, no. I never looked at a shoe as a fetish
or a phallic symbol. No, never. Shoes are a black man's
fetish.
MASON: Why?
PURIFOY: I don't know.
MASON: But I mean, what makes you feel that?
PURIFOY: Well, it's a fact. It's not what I feel, it's a
fact that shoes-- He can have on overalls, you know, but
his shoes are patent-leather shined. And Stacey Adams.
You know, he may not have the next meal, but he's going to
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have some Stacey Adams shoes. That is not generally known,
but that's fact, that's a fact. Having been born in rural
USA, I would know.
MASON: You were saying before that you had at some point
gone beyond Freud .
PURIFOY: Yeah, I'd rather go with Carl Jung. He's more
dependable than Sigmund Freud when it comes to symbols.
But I don't go for either one of them, because I just never
dug symbols. If I use them, it's unconscious. I know
they're important in art, but I just didn't go for it.
That's a funny way of communicating. I don't know if
everybody understands what a symbol means. You have to be
highly intelligent, and I wasn't speaking to intelligent
people through my art. I was trying to get black folks to
buy it .
MASON: The two are mutually exclusive? [laughter] Okay,
is there any more you want to say about the [University of
California, Santa Cruz] Cowell College teaching
experience? Did you say you wanted to say something about
Beatrice Thompson?
PURIFOY: Who?
MASON: Beatrice Thompson.
PURIFOY: No.
MASON: Okay. Then you came to a point where you stopped
being involved in the arts and-- No, actually we should
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talk about something before that. I wanted to talk about
the black art shows in the sixties and the galleries just
overall. What role do you think that the Brockman Gallery
and Suzanne Jackson's gallery. Gallery 32, and Samella
Lewis's Contemporary Crafts gallery--? Do you think they
really had a significant impact on either your career or
the career of any black artists, in terms of showing people
that weren't well known or just giving black artists an
outlet? You said that the Watts Towers [Arts Center] was
one outlet for black artists to show.
PURIFOY: One thing I didn't strive for while I was an
artist was reputation. I didn't want, I didn't need a
reputation as an artist, except to let it be known that I
was in fact an artist. And I repeat, art was a vehicle.
So the black artists' galleries, Alonzo [Davis's Brockman
Gallery], in particular, did not help my career. You know,
I wasn ' t concerned about a career in art . That ' s when I
dropped out. However, he gave me an opportunity to express
myself through that one-man show. Niggers Ain ' t Gonna Never
[Ever] Be Nothin' [All They Want To Do Is Drink + Fuck] . I
wanted to do that very badly. And visual arts is somewhat
like performing arts: once you get an idea you have to
implement it, and you need an audience to tell you if you
were on the track or not. So that's what that exhibit did
for me, and he made his gallery accessible to me for that
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show. However, I'd shown there several times before in
group showings.
But Alonzo was quite particular about who exhibited
there. We showed things at the Watts Summer Festivals that
nobody else would show, including Alonzo.
MASON: Like what?
PURIFOY: Like church art.
MASON: What's that?
PURIFOY: Folk art. You know. Things that people do for
church decoration. We called it art, but Alonzo wouldn't
touch it with a ten- foot pole. But we'd show it. We'd
show anything you bring us and show it a very prestigious
way.
I would have to say that the festival linked itself to
overall community art more than any other particular
entity. I don't take credit for that so much as I
attribute it to Tommy Jaquette. To put on the Watts Summer
Festivals every year for nine consecutive years, at which
time I participated with the art exhibits-- He had to beg
me every time, because I was busy doing other things, but
every time I'd break down and do it. There was no pay, but
we made these sacrifices in order to do the festivals. So
we were the major outlet. We went to schools and
encouraged teachers to have students produce things for us
for the-- I'd talk to artists every day, "Do something
114
professional. Do something unique." They just rallied
around. Everybody participated, except a few like Curtis
didn't.
MASON: You mean Curtis Tann?
PURIFOY: No, people like that didn't participate, but
everybody else did. Everybody participated. And a few
years we took in some art from out of the community, too,
as well, black and white.
What else did I want to say about the festivals? It
was usually six days. And we had problems in Watts because
of the riots. Nobody wanted to come to Watts anymore. So
we had to promise them if they'd come they'd be safe. In
order to make sure they were safe there in the area where
we were displaying, at the Will Rogers [State Historic]
Park auditorium, I stood there eight hours a day, six days
during the week, and made sure there was order. All I had
to do was turn my head and whatever was happening stopped
happening. We had absolute order in the auditorium.
People who were afraid to go to their cars, we would escort
them to their cars and make sure that they were not
harmed. Because black people were desperate, you know.
They'd just come up to you and say, "Give me your money,"
you know, "and let's don't have no bones about it." And
the cheapest way out is to give them your money. So
naturally, people didn't want to come, and we had to
115
promise them that they'd be safe. So we had good
attendance, and we sold quite a bit of stuff. As curator,
we took 10 percent--that's all--of everything sold.
MASON: Did you show your own work out there?
PURIFOY: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I showed "[66]
Signs of Neon" for several years. It was a wonderful
experience. I don't regret at all participating in the
Watts Summer Festivals. It gave me a good feeling that I
could do that and I could create order where there was no
order. Absolute order, I mean. I felt good that I could
command that of the Watts audience. They had respect for
us, for the artists, because--
MASON: Well, you knew most of the young people.
PURIFOY: We were doing good. We were doing good things.
MASON: Did you ever show at Suzanne Jackson's gallery or
Samella Lewis's gallery?
PURIFOY: There wasn't enough time. She [Jackson] was only
open a year. It was a nice, clean gallery, but small. But
a clean, beautiful structure, nice building, whatnot.
MASON: What about the other black art shows? Like "A
Panorama of Black Artists" at the [Los Angeles] County
Museum [of Art] in 1972 and ["Contemporary Black Artists of
America"] at the Whitney [Museum of American Art] in '71.
How did you feel about participating in those shows when
there was so much political controversy around the black
116
arts show and what is black art and--?
PURIFOY: I'm afraid I wasn't there in spirit. I'm sorry,
I just wasn't there. A lot of things that bother other
people didn't bother me. I was protected in one way or
another from all the trauma connected with denial and
rejection. It didn't phase me. I was busy. I was very
busy. The peace of mind that involvement brings is just
phenomenal. I haven't been at that place before or
since. So I was not there half the time, or half the time
I was gone somewhere else, cloud nine or someplace. I was
just having a ball. Life was good. I was exactly where I
wanted to be, doing exactly what I wanted to do. Absolute
freedom.
MASON: Then you said you did some protest pieces then,
because--
PURIFOY: Yeah, it was tongue-in-cheek, because other guys
were doing-- It's just like now. I did Tar and Feathers,
that's one I wanted to mention. That's not complete. The
feathers on it there--
MASON: Okay, in the slide.
PURIFOY: The pillow hangs off of it, so it's not complete
in that shot. But I did Tar and Feathers with no serious
thought of protest. Now, it's expected that a collection
as big as mine of a hundred pieces is supposed to have one
protest piece.
117
MASON: Because you're black.
PURIFOY: Yeah. Or something. [laughter] So Barrel and
Plow was kind of like a protest piece, but not serious.
I've done one as recently as a couple of weeks ago, but
only because I was reading about David Hanunond and his
escapades.
MASON: What were you reading about?
PURIFOY: Well, the Malcolm X thing.
MASON: The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition that was
going on in New York in the seventies, his connection with
that? Or something more recent?
PURIFOY: No, it's the article you read.
MASON: Oh, in Art in America?
PURIFOY: Yeah.
MASON: Oh, okay. No, I just saw it. I didn't read it.
PURIFOY: Oh, okay. It's a great article. David permeates
the whole book. They've got his picture in there this
time. I didn't think David would ever get old like me, but
he did. He finally got old. Suzanne never got old.
MASON: Suzanne Jackson?
PURIFOY: Uh-huh. She looks just like she always did,
beautiful. I saw her last summer, I guess.
MASON: But you never did any protest pieces in the sixties
or seventies.
PURIFOY: Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes.
118
MASON: Oh, okay. What--?
PURIFOY: I did lots of them.
MASON: Okay, what did they look like? Well, could you
talk about the ones that you mentioned. Tar and Feathers
and Burial Ground, and how they're protest pieces, and then
how they relate back to the ones that you were doing in the
sixties and the seventies, or if they do at all.
PURIFOY: Protest is protest. You have to develop a theme
that strikes people. Something that's current and
recognizable by all. Like Malcolm X, everybody knows
Malcolm X--that's what David did. They eat it up. But I
want to say something about protest art in general :
protest art is probably one of the highest expressions of
sentiment or deep feeling. So if art is about feeling,
then protest art is legitimate. But I don't think one who
has nothing to protest should do protest art. I have
nothing to protest. I have less now than I ever did. I am
not angry about anything. I promised everyone that I would
resolve my anger, and I did, and therefore I have no need
to do protest art.
I think protest art falls just short of the creative
process, just slightly short. It's identical with
political art, as expressed by Cuba and other countries at
large-- just a little bit short of the creative process.
I'm interested in the application of the creative
119
process. Not the thing itself, the application of it. And
the application of the creative process does not include
protest or hostility. There's nothing in the pure creative
process that's hostile. It has no extremes. It's neither
hot or cold. It's not either angry or pleased. It just
is. That's what the creative process is about. So when
you do protest art and call it creative, in a sense it _is^
creative, because you think of something that strikes
somebody as being the truth, and that's supposed to be
creativity. But there's creativity and there's
creativity. There's lord and god and master. They all
have their separate places, but one is higher than the
other one, and one's lower than the other two. So in pure
creativity-- Which is what I'm interested in, it was
applicable to me. It resolved my basic problem. Then it
did not include protest. Protest falls just slightly off
the creative process, so to me it's undesirable. I only do
it to get rid of my prejudice. That's the only reason I do
it. If you make a life's work out of that, you're the one
who suffers, not your public. I've been wanting to say
that a long time. [laughter] I finally got it out.
I would get a lot of opposition when the average black
person says, "Look around and see how often you're
discriminated [against] . Can you go to this golf club over
here, or can you go to the White House and do this and
120
that? Just look around you, boy, and you'll find reason to
do protest art or protest in some overt manner." I have to
agree with them, but I don't have to do it if I don't feel
it. If I've transcended it, then I think I need some
applause for that, but I don't expect it from a hostile
public that gets its kicks out of seeing other people
hurt. I might take that back. I'd take some of it back,
but not all of it.
If the public encourages protest art because it makes
somebody feel bad and guilty, I think there should be other
means by which to solve that problem and not use art to do
it with. And keep it clean, uncontaminated, as is, for our
posterity, for our children that are coming along. They
need to resort to something that's uncontaminated. There's
nothing left but art. It's the cleanest discipline we've
got or ever had. You'll notice the profound philosophers
of our times and any times refuse to analyze art. Even the
Freudians don't do it.
MASON: Well, Freud tried to do it. I mean, he wrote his
essay on da Vinci and--
PURIFOY: Tell me about that. I'm not aware of that.
MASON: I haven't read it.
PURIFOY: I'm not aware of it. I'm not aware of it.
MASON: It kind of spawned a whole movement in art history
to try to psychoanalyze the artist through particular
121
symbols in his work. And it usually--
PURIFOY: Not the artist's art. The artist and art are
different.
MASON: Right, exactly. [laughter] That's where they get
into trouble.
PURIFOY: I don't know anybody who'd choose to analyze art
but me. I've spent $10 million of the state's money trying
to do it, and it was premature. I'd rather say it can't be
done, because it has to be analyzed to be utilized.
MASON: Well, what criteria would you use to analyze art,
exactly?
PURIFOY: Art itself. The art process consisting of the
discipline, and the discipline of art is nothing more than
what makes art. It has its own rules. You make art this
way. You deal with vertical or horizontal lines, you deal
with baselines. Then you're dealing with this or that.
You're dealing with ground lines, you're dealing with
organic shapes, or what are you dealing with? You use that
to analyze art and to understand to what extent it ' s
applicable to human beings or to what extent human beings
are governed by these processes, or affected, for that
matter. You've heard people say, you know, "I don't know
what it is, but I know what I like." That's for lack of
knowledge of the art process. This applicability is my
concern, but it has to be structured first before it's
122
applicable. We spent most of our time trying to see to
what extent it was applicable to learning and teaching.
MASON: This is when you were teaching at Cowell College
and Immaculate Heart College and the other places?
PURIFOY: Well, I was trying to implement it, but it was at
the California Arts Council that I had money to research.
MASON: What happened then in your hiatus, when you stopped
making art?
PURIFOY: Well, I was trying to use my degree in social
service administration--to use all of my education--to see
if art would be applicable to mental health. To what
extent it was we still don't know.
I convinced my agency how if they were going to use
therapy on black people, they should make it short-term,
because black people cannot utilize long-term anything. I
mean poor people, not black people.
MASON: Did you try to work with a particular program that
was already in place there?
PURIFOY: No, I created it.
MASON: You created it, okay.
PURIFOY: We created art and drama, art and visual arts.
MASON: So during the same period you went to Cornell
[University], then, to work as an artist in residence, in
1973.
PURIFOY: No, that's a misprint.
123
MASON: Okay, when did you go to Cornell?
PURIFOY: I never have been.
MASON: Oh, I'm sorry. That's in your resume there. Okay,
so when you were at the Central City Community Mental Health
Facility, were you working with the same kinds of people you
were working with at the other mental health institution?
PURIFOY: In Cleveland?
MASON: Yeah.
PURIFOY: No. No, they weren't the same kind of mental
health-- Mental deficiency is one thing when acquired, but
another thing when you're born with it. We were dealing
with hydrocephalics and--
MASON: I'm sorry. What kind of people?
PURIFOY: Mental deficiencies in young children. But
that's different from mental deficiency that's acquired
through trauma.
MASON: You said you're not sure what came out of it
exactly.
PURIFOY: I'm not what?
MASON: You're not sure what came out of it. You're not
sure whether any of your programs were successful there, is
that what you were saying? In other words, when you left,
you felt like you left in the middle of something, or did
you feel like you had done what you set out to do when you
had started?
124
PURIFOY: No. There weren't enough knowledgeable people
there to implement the program. It turned out to be just a
social service program that dealt with social problems, not
mental problems. We had drawing, dance, drama, and
whatnot. A program to pass the time. Nobody got well.
MASON: What about your own self and your own development
during that time?
PURIFOY: Well, I got a big charge out of using all of my
resources directed at one specific task. I was able to
apply my social service degree, my acquisition of social
service, as well as my knowledge about psychiatry and
psychology, as the case was, as well as my knowledge about
art. It all went together easily in my own mind.
But to implement a program around it, you need people
who are also knowledgeable and believe in the idea. That
wasn't practical. They weren't willing to hire eligible,
qualified people. So it just became that I was another
social worker, doing the job of a social worker, that's
sitting at a big desk in a big office, waiting till
somebody had a complaint. We got the implication that it
would work, and by now we know that it works, that art is
therapeutic, but there's still some kinks in it. We still
aren't certain about art as therapy. There are too many
doubters, doubtful Toms, who believe in a direct approach
not an indirect approach to mental health.
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TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO
SEPTEMBER 22, 1990
PURIFOY: Now, what my input was-- We had weekly meetings
of staff people to receive input about one patient or
another. My beef was that you were educated in the white
institution where they told you that psychotherapy works on
people. But with all your knowledge about psychotherapy,
you know that a person with some kind of schizophrenia
would have to go years and years before he had any signs of
getting well. But black people have a short attention
span--that's what I was trying to convey to you--and they
cannot use long-term therapy. They'll go crazier. You're
just making them crazier.
Well, after talking four years of that, I finally got
through that they needed a short-term program. They
eliminated the hospital beds, and they started really to
work seriously about getting people well. That's what my
input did. That was the level on which I was effective,
but no other. When I left, I just fell out of touch,
because I was into something else. I don't know what
they're doing there now or what they did over the years. I
really don't know, but I derived a great deal of
gratification from the experiment.
MASON: How long was it before you felt that you were able
to go back and look at it in the way that you ' re explaining
126
it now? You said that you derived gratification from it,
but now you ' re saying that when you look back on it there
were a lot of problems.
PURIFOY: Well, I don't harbor problems. I find
solutions. That's what I'm good at. You see, I was
looking for a vehicle by which I could find ways to use art
as a tool to change people. When I couldn't do it at
Central City, I joined up with the state arts council, and
there we designed programs that attempted to integrate the
arts into the learning process.
MASON: You were a chair of the art in education
subcommittee? What kind of programs did you try to
design? Who were some of the people that you worked with
there? Just how did it work? How did the commission work
when you were there?
PURIFOY: Well, I remember sitting up nights when I first
got on the program in 1975. I think it was '75 or early
'76. Eloise Smith--Page [Smith] 's wife, whom I have
referred to, from Cowell College at [University of
California] Santa Cruz--was made director at the same time
I became a member of the council. Governor [Edmund G.
"Jerry"] Brown [Jr.] had reorganized the council to include
artists only. We had nine members, and we were all
artists. Among them were Gary Snyder and Peter Coyote,
with whom I sat to design a battery of programs for the
127
arts council. Outstanding among the programs that I
participated in designing were programs that heretofore had
not been heard of funded by an arts council. They were
called "Artists in Communities," "Artists in Schools," and
"Artists in Social Institutions." We actually placed
artists in these institutions and schools and communities
to work directly with the community, with people, with
students and so forth. There were three separate programs
that I participated in designing. A fourth program had to
do with alternatives in education. Attached to it was a
research component where the object was to explore the
possibility that art can be integrated into the subject
matter. It was called "Integration and Correlation of Art
Through Education." This was the fourth entity, in
addition to "Artists in Schools, " "Artists in Communities, "
and "Artists in Social Institutions."
To go back a ways, to explain more clearly what these
programs meant, was that we actually put artists in prisons
and social institutions to work directly with prisoners.
The results were phenomenal, particularly in prisons. At
present these programs still exist. They were done twelve,
fifteen years ago.
MASON: What were the artists supposed to do in prison?
PURIFOY: Well, the artists were supposed to attempt to
integrate or correlate the art into whatever was happening.
128
the process. In the case of drama, the problem that the
institution was facing was what we created the drama around
and in what we enabled the inmates to participate.
Now, this was done reasonably successfully in the
prisons, but in schools there was seldom the application of
art to education. It was art in education, not art as
education. The differences are that art in education is
art paralleled with education. You teach art and then you
teach education. Art as education is that you teach them
simultaneously. We made this distinction, but the artists
were never really able to apply the latter, art as
education, integration, and correlation, into the ABCs.
"Artists in Communities" was reasonably successful,
between "Artists in Schools" and "Artists in Social
Institutions." The program was fashioned much around what
we did in Watts. We designed programs that put the problem
in the streets. Put it where it belongs, where everybody
can see it. We designed art projects like murals and
whatnot, subject matter relative to what was going on and
what needed to be solved as a problem. So it was
reasonably successful, and they still use murals as a
media.
These are the three basic programs, funded each year
to the tune of several million dollars--not each, but in
toto, all together. The last word I got was these programs
129
were worth a million dollars or so.
This fourth program was a research project. It was an
extensive project that had artists in schools, just like in
the "Artists in Schools" program, except there was a real
serious attempt to integrate art into education, to teach
them both at the same time. It is alleged that poor
people- -particularly black people — can learn quicker and
better if art is integrated into the subject matter.
Chicanes can. If you've got a problem- -a language problem- -
it ' s better to teach the language through art than
directly. So this was actually going on in ten schools.
MASON: So you think it's--
PURIFOY: It's a research project which included ten
schools.
MASON: Okay, but you don't-- You're saying that it's
something that's racial? It's not just that kids learn
better through art — it's that black kids learn better or
Chicano kids learn better? Is that the distinction you're
making?
PURIFOY: All kids learn better. All kids learn better.
But some kids don't need-- Their intelligences are such
that they don't need to have a tool through which to learn,
other than learning itself, direct. Some kids learn better
if the learning is indirect. In other words, if a kid
hates school, doesn't like to come to school, he'll come to
130
school if he's going to be in a play. Now, this play is
teaching about Lincoln, so he's learning history at the
same time. That's integration. That's where it's
integrated according to subject matter. This was done in
the research projects but not generally in the other
"Artists in School" programs.
We would place, on an average, thirty to forty artists
a year--new ones. The old ones could reapply for two
consecutive years or three consecutive years, and then
they'd have to drop out and let somebody else come in. So
the money was well spent and still is being well spent, but
it's most visible in institutions and prisons. The
prisoners who utilize this program don't come back. It
helps to overcome drugs and whatever.
MASON: What was the big problem with the schools? Why
didn't the "Artists in Schools" project work? Were the
schools resisting that kind of integration? Because before
you were saying that they thought of it more as recreation.
PURIFOY: Well, generally, if the program was in a school,
it needed a school-accepted program, because they have to
pay part of the salary of the artist. They have to pay
one-third of the cost of the artist's salary. So
generally, there was one person or principal who was in
favor of the program, but if the teachers aren't in favor
of it you don't get any cooperation, the artists don't get
131
the cooperation from the teachers. There's prejudice,
discrimination, segregation, and ostracization. The artist
is in strange territory. So they have to mend their way,
use creative process, become one with the unit or with the
teaching staff. So that's one reason it didn't work.
The other reasons were that the artists needed to be
oriented to the idea, because they weren't used to it.
They oftentimes had never heard of integration and
correlation of art into education. This should have been
one of the criteria by which we selected the artists, but
there were so few artists who even knew about education--
Till the program needed to have been revised, if not
abandoned, in terms of what it was designed for. So it
never reached its goal. And still, till today, it's not.
In four years, we've used up all the money for the
creative research project called "Alternatives in
Education." We used up all the money in four years, and
then we spent another year to collect the results and
analyze the results and in supervising and so forth.
MASON: Did you publish the report, or was it just an
internal document?
PURIFOY: We got reams of data. Publication? No. Because
there were no results. The problem was that there is no
testing method designed to determine if art in fact can be
used as a tool for learning. One or two institutions
132
attempted to design a tool that would test for integration,
but they weren't sure. The variables were of such a nature
that you create a great deal of uncertainty. So we could
say that the program was premature.
Not that the state squandered $10 million. No, I
couldn't put that in the record, but I can say that since
we designed that program, a lot of people have become
convinced that we need something to encourage kids to come
to school. So they turn from sports to art often, in many
schools. Sports has served its purpose for a long time,
but it's short-lived. The results are short-lived. Art
has a more lasting potential to impress children that you
in fact see something unique in the world every day,
something you didn't see before, although you pass it
daily. That's what art education teaches one to do, to see
differently and to feel differently about what you see. To
verbalize what you see in ways in which a listener can
understand. Lots of kids can't do that even after
finishing high school.
MASON: Well, you can see how important that is for kids
growing up in places like Watts or other communities,
because there's a place where visualizing things, looking
at things, is definitely blunted or stunted because--
PURIFOY: [inaudible]
MASON: Yeah, that's true. I mean, you don't look at--
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PURIFOY: You're taught.
MASON: Yeah, you don't look at these people, because you
know this guy's a drug dealer, and you know you don't look
at that interaction or you don't look at these buildings,
because they're all burnt out, or you don't look at things
because they're supposed to be ugly, and you're kind of
tuned out .
PURIFOY: Even to a sunset. You know, like appreciation,
teach art appreciation. But to what extent it's
transferable is what our problem is. So we can teach a
child all we want to about recognizing a Picasso or
recognizing a Rembrandt and so forth, but how do you
transfer that to enjoying a sunset? Looking at and
appreciating a sunset is a far cry in a poor community
and/or black one. The kids just don't learn to appreciate
the simplest things because they can't see them. They're
too busy with something else, whatever they're busy with,
[laughter]
MASON: Okay, one last question and I think we can stop for
today, unless you have something to add. In this hiatus,
when you weren't making any art, was that a conscious
decision that you made or was it something that just
happened because you felt like you were expressing yourself
in a different role?
PURIFOY: That's a good question, because it gives me the
134
opportunity to explain the reason why I was looking for
another vehicle to see to what extent one single person can
effect change in the large world that we live in. I
thought I ' d found another vehicle other than art . I
thought I'd found the California Arts Council as a vehicle
through which I could be effective, conununicate my ideas.
It didn't work through art. At least it was premature
through art. But I thought a more direct approach would be
through a state arts council where they had money to design
and implement programs. So I thought I had found my life's
work. It was easy for me to give up art and never
anticipate going back to that, because I could spend the
rest of my life trying to find a means by which one can
synthesize the left brain with the right brain and come up
with some kind of profound concept about how people learn
what they need to know to exist in the world.
But after eleven years and $10 million, this too I
used up without fully realizing my objective to use art as
a tool for learning, as a tool for change, as the case is,
when you're not in school. I know how it helped me, so I
figured I could pass this on. The council had the money to
do it with, and I had the spiel to convince them that they
ought to be doing it, they ought to allocate the money to
do it with, which they did.
We were satisfied that the idea is an excellent one.
135
Somebody is going to do it one of these days, but while we
were doing it, it was premature. Other people over the
country were also experimenting with it, and some people in
other countries were experimenting with the idea. But none
were necessarily successful as such, profoundly successful,
that is. It's such a wonderful idea that we are certain it
will come to pass one day. The Rockefeller Foundation
spent millions of dollars on the art in education
concept. The foundation is spending moneys to determine to
what extent art can be utilized for learning, but not as a
tool necessarily. They have a program that's designed
around art in education, parallel with, not taught at the
same time, simultaneously. I think simultaneous teaching
of art and education is a lot more effective than the
parallel teaching of art and education, which I hope the
[J. Paul] Getty [Trust] people will learn about at some
time.
That's why I came back to art. I had nowhere else to
go after education. I am not particularly sure-- I mean,
I'm not particularly-- Well, I can admit defeat on a level
where I'm not struggling with the idea anymore. I'm not
looking for a vehicle anymore. I'm closer to doing art for
its own sake now than I ever was, although I don't believe
in it as such, just because of circumstances. The people
don't dig what I'm doing out here. You know, they don't
136
like junk art. [laughter] So that makes me doing it for
its own sake, because I can't look forward to selling it
anywhere. But I'm at a place now where that-- I'm not
serious at all. I'm not overly concerned about it.
MASON: Okay. Well, we can maybe talk more about that
tomorrow .
137
TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE ONE
SEPTEMBER 23, 1990
MASON: Today is Sunday, September 23, and I'm talking with
Noah Purifoy. We just wanted to clean up a few loose ends
before we start to talk about your move out to the
desert. We want to talk a little more about the different
organizations in Watts that sprang up in the sixties and
how they were related to each other. And you want to talk
more about Judson Powell.
PURIFOY: Yes. I wouldn't want this interview to end
without emphasizing what an important role Judson Powell
played in the projects we designed. I would also like to
mention particularly Sue Welch, Lucille Krasne, and Debbie
Brewer, who were participants in the project at Watts and
the Watts Towers [Arts Center] . But particularly Judson,
who went on to assist me in the finding and the management
of "[66] Signs of Neon."
As I stated yesterday, I believe, around 1968 or '69,
the "Signs of Neon" exhibition actually no longer existed
in the form in which we had been displaying it all those
years prior. As a result of that, I had taken another job
with the Central City Community [Mental] Health [Facility],
and Judson Powell had gone on to try to create a community
center in Compton called the [Communicative] Arts Academy,
I believe. I didn't participate in any way in assisting
138
Judson to design the project. I understood that he had
inherited from some politician in Watts or someplace
$40,000 to design a community program. So he proceeded to
do that. In the meantime, I started working for the
California Arts Council, and Judson applied ultimately for
funds to run his project. But because of the complicated
system which is common with most bureaucratic agencies
connected with the state government, we were unable to fund
Judson 's project. I was very unhappy about that.
MASON: I was just wondering if you could explain a little
more why he couldn't comply with the requirements for the
funding.
PURIFOY: The most I could do in terms of assisting Judson
to write a proper proposal was to advise him about the
guidelines and the various components of a proposal, which
were clear in our guidelines, stating precisely the kind of
information one must provide in order to get a grant.
Oftentimes people did not comply with this because they
thought they had a better method of writing proposals,
which wasn't the case. Because of this and other reasons,
primarily reasons that had to do with our system of
selecting proposals-- We had a committee to select
proposals and reject proposals. The ones who complied with
the guidelines more exactly were the ones that were
granted, and the others were not granted from year to year.
139
Now, because of this system we weren't able to fund
some worthy people, particularly blacks and Chicanes who
had vital programs existing in the community, simply
because they didn't have the sophistication necessary to
write a proper proposal to get funds. This concerned me
all the years I was on the council. As a result of that, a
couple of years before I left--which was 1987 probably,
'86, '87, into 1988--the council was trying to devise some
means by which they could reduce the guidelines, or rather
subdue the guidelines, to a point where black people and
Chicanes who had vital programs could qualify. We tried
for years to fund American Indian projects without any
success. We even implored an American Indian on the staff
to advise us, but we weren't able to get to those people.
It ' s very unfortunate that the very people who need the
assistance most have not been funded by the state arts
council up to the time in which I left, which was 1987 or
'88.
Now, regarding projects in Watts-- Aside from Judson's
project, which happened late in the seventies rather than
the sixties, there was-- Westminster [Neighborhood
Association] I believe is the name of the community agency
which resembled Karamu House in Cleveland more than any
other organization because it was socially welfare
oriented, as well as an accompaniment of some art projects.
140
MASON: I'm sorry. What do you want to say about that?
PURIFOY: Socially oriented, meaning that they were
concerned about the social and physical welfare of the
people--and the financial welfare of the people--as well as
the aesthetic welfare.
MASON: But weren't all the projects concerned in some way
with that aspect of the community?
PURIFOY: No, no. The project that we had in Watts, the
Watts Towers, was not specifically concerned about the
welfare of the person in general. Our concern was the
teaching of art and aesthetics, primarily. However, at
heart we had strong feelings for the people, and we had
projects that linked themselves to the well-being of the
community, such as cleaning up the street, painting the
houses, and being concerned about the next-door neighbor,
as the case was. We were down on 107th Street, and we had
neighbors next door and across the street and so forth.
So we were all friendly and whatnot and shared what we
had, but it wasn't a community project in the least.
MASON: Okay, so how did Westminster go beyond that?
PURIFOY: Well, Westminster was partially funded, I
believe, by the state and the city. I'm not sure. But
anyhow, they were kind of a social agency that had some art
projects. Their emphasis was primarily on the social and
141
physical welfare of the conununity rather than the
aesthetics. But it resembled a community art project
similar to the one that we had been familiar with in
Cleveland, Karamu House.
^4AS0N: Who was the director of Westminster?
PURIFOY: I don't recall who was the director at the time,
but I think it still exists.
MASON: Now, what about Studio Watts?
PURIFOY: Well, Studio Watts was short-lived.
MASON: That was on Grandee Avenue.
PURIFOY: Yeah, yeah.
MASON: How far away?
PURIFOY: They emphasized drama more than the visual arts,
drama and poetry more than the visual arts, as the case
was. You asked me earlier about to what extent these
organizations cooperated with each other. We didn't. I
want to mention a few. There were more, there were a lot
more, but I don't recall them at the moment. There was
little or no coming together except during the festivals
from 1966 till 1970. Each year all of them would
participate in the Watts Summer Festival. So that was the
time that all the organizations came together to make one
large one-week-long event for the community.
MASON: I was saying the other day that I was confused
about the different Watts festivals, how your Watts
142
festival that you had over in Will Rogers [State Historic
Park] auditorium was different from or connected with the
festival we associate now with the Watts Towers jazz
festival. Well, the Watts Towers Music and Arts Festival.
PURIFOY: Maybe it will become more clear if we could
separate the various events in terms of years. In the
sixties, that was a time for the annual yearly festivals
ultimately managed and implemented by Tommy Jacquette. The
other major component, the art component, was managed by
me, with the assistance of Judson Powell and others.
Those were the only events happening in Watts in the
sixties. There were no other public events, events that
involved all the people. In the seventies, when John
Outterbridge became director of the Watts Towers Arts
Center, he started, I believe--I'm not certain--the drum
festivals, etc., the music festivals in general. This was
taking place in the seventies on the premises at the Watts
Towers .
Now, the summer festivals were given at the Will
Rogers Park, so these were two separate facilities that
were frequented by the people and whose setting would lend
itself to these events. So again, the Watts Summer
Festivals in the sixties were at the Will Rogers Park. The
art exhibitions were at the Will Rogers Park auditorium,
and nothing else was happening in the sixties of
143
consequence. These very small organizations would all come
together, as we said earlier, and participate in the
festival, but they themselves were not giving a community
event, an event that involved the community. No special
organization in Watts at the time or anywhere nearby was
giving any special events, except the summer festivals.
In the seventies, John Outterbridge had begun the
music festivals, and there are no summer festivals now
taking place at Will Rogers Park. There were just the
music festivals in Watts in the seventies and eighties.
Those are the only public events that I can recall at the
moment. They were separated by years more than by
events. They did not come together at any one time because
they were given at different times.
MASON: I wanted to ask you how you would account for this
kind of art boom in the sixties, or the kind of arts
explosion in the sixties, where there were all these art
projects going on and your projects using art to educate
people, whereas it seems in the fifties things were a lot
quieter and artists were kind of underground and sort of
suspect. I'm wondering if that's your perception of
things, and, if so, how would you account for that
transition?
PURIFOY: I understand your question to be asking why all
these art projects in Watts particularly. Is that what
144
you're asking?
MASON: Well, yeah. A lot of them were in Watts, but just
the whole California Arts Council. That started in the
mid-sixties. Then there were things going on in other
cities, in Chicago and New York. But especially in Los
Angeles, there seemed to be more of a boom in the sixties,
whereas the fifties seemed to be a little more quiet. Do
you think there were just more artists here working or — ?
PURIFOY: No, I don't think that was the case. I think we
just came out of the woodwork. We were back there
somewhere doing something. But I think as a result of the
nationwide riot having started in Los Angeles, in Watts,
and then spreading over the country, it made people in Los
Angeles and the vicinity feel guilty sooner than the people
in other cities as the result of the events, particularly
connected with discrimination and segregation. I believe
that art became a boom because people were feeling guilty
about their isolation and estrangement from each other in
general . I sincerely believe the riots brought on those
kinds of feelings in people in general, particularly in Los
Angeles, if not the whole state of California.
As a result of their feelings, I imagine they said to
themselves, "I want to do something." In fact, I've heard
this echoed often during the holocaust and those times in
the sixties. "I would just like to do something," they
145
would say. These are mostly white people talking. So they
came from Beverly Hills and here and thither, all over the
place, to Watts to do something, bringing their skills with
them. And the result was the Watts Towers Arts Center, as
the case was. People came from everywhere to help us do
what we were doing, whatever it was we were doing. I have
snapshots of crowds of people on that one little street
involved in carrying food for the kids that were doing the
work and all that. I think they just felt guilty that they
had been so separated from what was going on in the
community at large. They just thought they'd come and
participate or see if they could. So as I said, they
brought their skills with them and corralled us, so to
speak, and started a lot of projects. I can't think of any
projects that didn't involve a goodly number of volunteers
that came from outside to offer their assistance as well as
dollars, moneys to assist in the development of programs.
I think this was evident all over the country. When I
was in Washington, D.C., with the "Signs of Neon," at the
Gallery of Modern Art, I experienced the identical same
thing, persons wanting to utilize art to demonstrate their
feelings for each other, so to speak. As I said before in
a previous interview, I was asked to develop some projects
there in Washington, D.C., because they too have had a lot
of debris as results of the rioting there. So I think that
146
comes pretty close to my opinion regarding why the upsurge
of art. It's just that I think that during hard times we
turn to the aesthetics as relief, and rightly so.
It was extremely violent times in Watts, but maybe-- I
don't know what would have happened if we had not had the
art projects and whatnot- -to what extent the people getting
involved might have prevented further crime . I don ' t
know. I really don't know. I know that Watts was slow in
building itself back up. Even till this day. Watts is
still a blighted community, so to speak.
You didn't ask me what resulted from the efforts, but
if you were to ask me what were the results of the
tremendous effort that was poured into that community
during the riot-- Although I was there, I could not tell
you, because I don't know what would have happened if we
had not had it. I know we involved a few people--
considering the large population--that otherwise would have
had nothing to do, the drama class, for instance. Those
kids were just ripe for some kind of mischief. But as a
result of Steve Kent working with the kids and all, we not
only got them to participate in drama, we encouraged them
to go back to school or stay in school, as the case was.
So those are just little things that happened as results of
the riot, I'd say, and as a result of people coming to give
a hand .
147
MASON: You also wanted to mention your trip to Africa, to
the arts festival, in the late seventies.
PURIFOY: Yeah. As early as 1975, I would say, I started
getting communications from what was called FESTAC. I've
forgotten what FESTAC means. It means something in
particular [World Black and African Festival of Arts and
Culture]. I have some literature on it, but it's not
available right at the moment.
To anticipate a trip to Africa was a little confusing,
to say the least. However, during the course of two years,
I received correspondence from FESTAC, located in
Washington [D.C.] and New York, I think. I complied with
every request, meaning that you have to submit certain
slides of your work and you have to have certain health
certificates and you have to submit birth certificates.
You have to submit a whole bunch of things when they take a
responsibility for you going to a foreign country. I
complied with every request, always with a degree of
trepidation. What I mean by that is I had seen one too
many Tarzan pictures with black people with large disk lips
and spears and shields and whatnot. Savages, so to
speak. I didn't want to go to Africa to see that. I was
hoping I wouldn't see that if I went to Africa, and yet a
free trip to Africa was something you just couldn't afford
to turn down.
148
So I just sat down and made every effort to qualify,
and finally the day came when they asked us to meet up in
San Francisco and board a plane from there to New York and
to Spain and then to Africa. I had already shipped my
stuff ahead of me--that is, my art work that I was going to
display. And I had a companion [Ann Noriega] , also, who
had become eligible for the trip. We boarded a plane in
San Francisco. I don't recall quite how we got from Los
Angeles to San Francisco, but anyhow we boarded a plane and
headed for New York.
MASON: Do you remember which pieces you sent over there?
PURIFOY: No. No, I don't remember. I don't think they
asked for more than two. I sent two pieces, I think. But
the pieces I liked, you know. In 1977 I wasn't doing art
then, so I didn't have anything new that I'd done that year
or the year before, but I still had some pieces around
decent enough to send to Africa.
We were not the first artists to arrive in Africa.
There were several other planeloads of people. I think the
plane that we were aboard could carry up to a hundred
people, I'm not sure. But the total number of people at
the festival in Africa was several hundred, coming on two
ships at two different times from all over the world. They
were supposed to be all black people, but they weren't all
black people.
149
When I arrived in Africa, I was amazed to find that
Nigeria looked just like Los Angeles I They carted us to a
compound already designed for us to live in, and they were
apartment houses made of concrete, one-room structures with
a bath and all. Some of them were incomplete, but
nevertheless they were fairly comfortable. Except for the
heat. I doubt seriously if I got more than two or three
hours of sleep per night, because there was no air-
conditioning in the apartments. Because there were so many
people there from all over the world, it was a total
involvement. The people who were supposed to take charge
were not always present, so there were many times when I
had to make plans on my own to get to see what I wanted to
see. I was mostly interested in their art and education,
so I visited the university and the museums. Those were
places I went on my own. But FESTAC had a big arena where
everybody met every day. That's where the exhibits were,
and that's where the people came to discuss different ideas
and things like that. It was a great experience.
MASON: You said you went to museums and then there were
these discussions. I'm just wondering if there was any
particular thing that stands out in your mind when you went
to the museum. I guess in Lagos [Nigeria] , you know, was
there a particular piece of artwork or anything like that
that stood out in your mind or in these discussions that
150
took place among all of these artists? Was there a
particular issue or a certain discussion that maybe kept
coming up that everybody was interested in or that struck
you?
PURIFOY: Unfortunately, I don't have my notes with me or
some literature I brought back from Africa. I brought a
whole bunch of film back, a lot of data on the events that
occurred. But the answer to your question is yes, there's
one thing that stuck out in my mind most of all, and it
didn't have anything to do with art. It had to do with
politics.
FESTAC was highly politically oriented. In fact, the
commander, the potentate, the high chief, you know, would
come on the premises of this big arena and lecture to us,
because we were asked to come at a certain time of day two
or three times, we were asked to all come together. The
first night we were there we came together to sit in this
big auditorium. Although I didn't fully understand the
emphasis that was placed on the politics, it was purely
political. FESTAC was designed for that idea. It's to
isolate, separate black people from white people, and
through this separation demonstrate that black people
constitute a greater population in the world than white
people and that they- -black people- -can become leaders of
the world. That was the overtone of FESTAC. That was what
151
I interpreted. It was a political event.
MASON: So it was something to foster black nationalism or
maybe black internationalism or something.
PURIFOY: Yeah, that's the way it felt to me. But I admit
that I didn't thoroughly understand it, because I wasn't
interested in politics, neither then or now. That's an
interesting question, though. I never said it to anybody
because it was of little concern to me, but those were the
overtones .
MASON: But even in spite of that, I mean, was everything--?
You said you got to do some things on your own, so
everything wasn't orchestrated.
PURIFOY: Was not orchestrated?
MASON: Yeah, because you said you got to do some things
just through errors. You got to do some things.
PURIFOY: Well, I didn't get to go to some major events
that occurred, like some parties that were given at certain
people's houses that were recognized in the community and
all that. But I did go and visit some community people and
saw the condition in which they were living, in little huts
and whatnot, just like in the movies. You know, that's the
kind of condition in which some of them were living out in
the rural communities.
I marveled at how healthy the community looked, but
when I started visiting the homes of some of the people I
152
learned that they hide their cripples. They don't permit
them to come out in public, and that's why everybody looked
so healthy. I would come out there- -
MASON: You mean it's just for the festival.
PURIFOY: No. They hide them. They hide them all the
time. They're ashamed of the cripples. So when I went to
these villages, there they were, hobbling about. It's just
like anywhere else you go. In appearance the communities
look healthy and vital, but they had their health problems
just like everyone else.
MASON: So your interpretation was that Nigeria was trying
to promote itself as the leader of black people all over
the world.
PURIFOY: I got that feeling. I really got that feeling,
because they had just struck oil and there was evidence of
money all over the place. They had started to build a
hospital and for some reason stopped. All the exotic and
costly equipment was lying out exposed to the weather. I
was unhappy about seeing that. Acres of equipment. Beds,
you know, exotic beds that do funny things, fold up in the
middle and all that. That bothered me a great deal,
because it just indicated the absence of management. I
didn't see a single white person in management in all of
Nigeria. Not a single one. If I saw one, he was some type
of mechanic or something, dealing with some complicated
153
instruments that otherwise they actually didn't have the
skills.
MASON: So was that good or bad that there were no white
people in management positions?
PURIFOY: I can't comment whether it was good or bad,
because I didn't try to determine whether it was good and
bad. My impression was, "Good, they got rid of them." But
when I saw the waste, underneath that waste was poor
management. I said, "If the presence of white people means
good management, they need to get back a few to get this
city on the road, because this is absolute waste."
Millions of dollars worth of equipment just deteriorating
in the sun. They stopped building the hospital for some
reason or another.
Generally, though, my stay in Africa was extremely
pleasant. The communications with the people there were
superb. I saw the resemblance of my whole family,
immediate family unit. Women that looked just like my
sisters and men that looked just like my brothers. "I know
where I come from now," I thought. "I come from somewhere
around Nigeria, because the people look so much like me,
flat head and all." [laughter]
I was more than pleased with the general demeanor and
deportment and behavior, I've been in an auditorium where
there was a row of kids twenty or thirty deep, and one
154
adult has only to turn around and look and they're all as
quiet as a mouse. Every adult is a parent in Africa, and
every child belongs to the conununity. So since I must have
been in my early sixties in 19-- No, in my late fifties in
1977 —
MASON: Sixties.
PURIFOY: No, I was in my sixties. I was looked upon as a
father person. After dark I was carted to beer joints and
had beer bought for me all evening. Some person who looked
upon me as a father person and would hang around me all day
the next day to see if I would drop a few words of wisdom
and so forth. I didn't necessarily encourage that, but it
was interesting to observe it and experience it.
MASON: Does any of this experience come out in your later
work? Either an object that you picked up there, maybe, or
some relationship?
PURIFOY: No. I brought some ebony back, chips of ebony
wood, a big block of ebony wood. I carted it all the way
back to America, six thousand miles. And a club.
MASON: I'm sorry, a — ?
PURIFOY: A club. You know, an adz type of hammer, a stick
that an adz fits in, where they chop wood and fasten
wood. Those are the only two souvenirs I brought back.
But I could have brought back a whole population of
Africans who wanted to live in America. It seems like
155
every African wants to come to America. There were some
youths from Chad--which is not far from Nigeria--and they
were having a little war there, and they didn't want to go
home. They wanted to stay in Nigeria or come home with me,
as the case was. [laughter]
I didn't develop any lifelong friends of this sort
visiting Africa, but it certainly turned my life around,
because ultimately I knew the source of my identity. And
the Tarzan pictures that I've seen, I will lay them to
rest, because Africa is as fully civilized as the rest of
the world.
156
TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE TWO
SEPTEMBER 23, 1990
MASON: Did you use the ebony wood and the club in your
work?
PURIFOY: Uh-huh.
MASON: Which pieces did you use that in?
PURIFOY: I can't remember specifically because I used up
slivers of it very sparingly, but I distributed it
throughout my works for quite a while. That's when I
started back to work, which was a couple of years ago. I
kept it. And I got the big ad on one of my things that I
showed at the [California Afro- American] Museum on Expo
[Exposition Boulevard] .
MASON: Okay. Okay, all right. So you're still on La Brea
[Avenue], then. When did you move to Arlington [Avenue]?
No, you just had your studio on Arlington.
PURIFOY: No, I lived there. The house on La Brea I lived
in for thirty years. I liked that place because a lot of
things happened there over the years. I'd go off to Santa
Cruz and spend two or three months and come back and find
the place occupied by my friends and all clean and spic and
span. I finally concluded the place didn't belong to me,
it belonged to the people who frequented it. A lot of
delightful experiences happened there, and a lot of artists
came through simply because that was a meeting place for
157
artists over the years.
MASON: People like John Outterbridge?
PURIFOY: Yeah. [tape recorder off] I think I would like
to mention again and include in my discussion my companion,
Ann Noriega. She was a dress designer. At least that's
what made her eligible for the FESTAC. We were traveling
partners and had experienced our visit to Africa together
more or less. I didn't want to conclude about Africa until
I mentioned about Ann, because she's been a lifelong
friend.
Now what?
MASON: We were talking about La Brea, and you said that--
PURIFOY: Oh, yes. I came to Los Angeles in about 1950,
'51. I lived in central Los Angeles for eight or ten
years, and then I moved to a little space, a little one-
room apartment on La Brea, in about 19-- Oh, it must have
been '58 or '59. It was attached to a garage, so there was
unused space that I ultimately expanded into a three-room
apartment and a studio in addition. So I had made the
place very comfortable, from a one-room apartment to a
three- or four-room apartment. It had a garage attached to
it, so that was the space I utilized to build these extra
rooms .
Since most of the events of one nature or another
happened to me while I was on La Brea, this house became a
158
center for the community artists, for the most part.
Because here was a place we could discuss our lives in
connection with art. We could plan for the future here,
or, as the case was, we could reexperience the past and
plan for the future. So here was a place where I had my
most profound spiritual experiences as well as art
experiences. I would go away for two, three months at a
time up to [University of California] Santa Cruz to teach
something or go out of state with "Signs of Neon" and come
back and find that the place had been occupied by friends
who cared for it equally as much as I did, or as well as I
did. After my stint at Santa Cruz, students would come
from Santa Cruz on weekends and spend the weekend there,
some of whom I did not know or had not met while in Santa
Cruz. So the place became a center for people rather than
for artists as such. A real delightful experience.
Mrs. Chew, who owned the place, a Chinese woman.
Oriental woman, whom I made friends with over the years,
decided to sell the place and go back to China. So I had
two weeks' notice to move. My friend Dorsey Robinson, a
longtime friend, lent me his assistance, and he carted me
all over town looking for a place to move, mostly downtown
L.A., where we could find a loft or something that was
suitable for an artist, so to speak. We finally found this
place on Arlington, which was extremely expensive according
159
to how much I'd been paying. I'd been paying under $200 a
month for this space where I was. And it had a big patio,
I forgot to mention that, and a garden in back and all
that. An extremely pleasant place to be, although it was
on the busiest street in L.A. . Because of the trees that
surrounded the place, it was totally isolated, and I could
scarcely hear noise from the street. The sirens and
whatnot were almost not audible. The freeway was not far
away, and I could scarcely ever hear the drone of the cars
there. So it was a retreat or haven.
When the time came to go, I did not regret leaving
somehow. I don't know why. Maybe because it wasn't the
place it used to be. The artists, after spending ten,
twelve years on the [California Arts] Council, stopped
coming, and I was more or less isolated there, without much
going and coming. When the time came to move, I didn't
regret it much. It's just that I was a little leery about
paying nearly $1,400 a month for rent. But it was a
wonderful space upstairs in an old Masonic lodge on
Arlington in Los Angeles. I had a studio and a gallery,
which I made, and living quarters all in one space. Across
the hall was an artist who occupied the whole across-the-
hall space. At both ends were also studios where artists
would come frequently. So all in all there were six of us--
six artists there--and we began to establish a great
160
camaraderie in exchanging ideas.
MASON: They were all assemblagists?
PURIFOY: No, no. No, we were all doing different things,
quite different things. I mentioned Mary Bonnie because
she was my closest neighbor, right across the hall. She
was doing exotic things with an oriental motif. You know,
kind of oriental-like things.
MASON: Paintings or collages?
PURIFOY: Paint, paint on wood. I just mentioned her in
passing because she was closest and we spent more time
together. We had an open house, and I sold a few things,
enough to pay the rent, but eventually I knew I would have
to move. My first alternative was a loft downtown where I
could get space for half the rent, but even at $600 a month
it was still expensive for me, having retired and all,
drawing Social [Security] income. However, business begun
to pick up and I thought I could make it if I hustled. But
upon reflection, I am not a hustler. I am not used to
hustling my work. And so, as a result, I chose to move to
the desert with my friend Debbie Brewer.
MASON: Let's talk about the gallery that you had there.
PURIFOY: The gallery on Arlington at the old Masonic
lodge?
MASON: Yeah. Did you have a name for it?
PURIFOY: Yes. I began to put out brochures, and I had
161
some cards printed up. It was called the Gallery at the
Old Masonic Lodge. I thought that was quite a poetic name
for it.
The open house was an exciting evening. There was
lots of food and all my friends came. Virtually all of my
friends came, meaning nonartists and all. And open house
was virtually open house. The Masonic building-- All the
upstairs floors were utilized for artists, as I have
aforestated, and everyone had his door open that day.
There were a lot of goings and comings and a lot of oohs
and ahs. I was the only one who sold anything that day, of
course, but it helped toward the rent. But as a result of
the open house--for which we sent out invitations and all--
there were a lot of people coming back from time to time
after the open house. And my friends came back, too. Many
bought stuff that they couldn't even afford to buy.
MASON: How much were you selling things for?
PURIFOY: Well, the price kind of went up. I had small
things for as little as $150 — well, really $90 to my
friends--but other things went up to $5,000, for one
piece. That is, a triptych set, a piece called Beige,
Black, and Tan, sold for $3,500, a three-panel unit. So I
had a good day. Now, considering that I hadn't had
anything to drink or smoke, after everybody left, I broke
out a quart of wine and I got myself a pack of cigarettes.
162
and I stayed up all night. It was lots of fun. It's
reexperiencing the art world after having been away for so
long.
Now that I'm in the desert, it's a whole-- It's quite
a different life-style.
MASON: Can we talk about that? We've been deferring it
all day. [laughter]
PURIFOY: Yeah.
MASON: So finally.
PURIFOY: Yeah, quite a different life-style. My friends
were quite sympathetic about my moving, and they bought
stuff when they couldn't even afford it. I had enough
money finally to move to the desert, bring all my stuff
practically, and in addition money to build a studio. So I
started out to build a studio almost right away. By
wintertime-- In fact, it was last August that I moved
here. I think a year ago today we first met, you and I.
On August 1, I believe, you came. So I moved here a year
ago August 1 . And three or four months later I built a
studio. It was all finished, as finished as it was going
to be, and I had begun to try to start work.
I wasn't sure I'd like the desert. I made visits out
here from time to time to see my friend Debbie and to
assist her with her new house and all . But every time I
came, except for one time during the spring, when all the
163
desert was blooming, I had felt forlorn and sad for some
reason or other. Because of the vast space and the Joshua
trees, it just gives the impression of desolation and sheer
poverty, actually. The earth is poor. It won't bring
forth green stuff. That's what I miss most of all being
here, since everything is brown here or beige or purple, as
the case might be. But having lived here for a while,
despite the severe weather- -very hot in the summertime and
very cold in the wintertime--I ' ve come to like it.
As I said before, I look up less often in antici-
pation. What that means is that when I was in L.A. as an
artist, there were a lot of comings and goings, so every
little noise I'd hear-- As you know, most artists are
extremely sensitive to noise, because they spend quiet
times in their head. All the time it's quiet in their
heads, and the least drop of a pin- type noise can become
extremely disturbing to the thought process. Here in the
desert, the rabbits, the birds, the scorpions, the lizards
all run quiet. You can see them for long distances, but
you can't hear them. The birds squawk, the quails squeak,
the buzzards buzz, or whatever they do- -honk- -and it's a
haven for wildlife, because I live six miles from downtown
Joshua Tree, the only town this side of Yucca Valley,
except for Twenty-nine Palms. To go to the store, I go six
miles, give or take, if not thirteen, to Yucca Valley. But
164
I always enjoy the trip, because it's quiet and pleasant
and you hardly encounter any cars on the road. On some
roads it's so infrequently used they don't even have
centerlines or markers. I have learned to live here, and
it's rather pleasant.
MASON: Of course, the big question, the obvious question,
is, as an assemblagist, how do you adapt to the desert?
How do you find materials to work with?
PURIFOY: Well, it's quite different here when it comes to
finding materials. Everything here is recycled. They have
a swap meet every Saturday and Sunday in Yucca Valley, and
you'd be amazed at the stuff that is exchanged there,
because it's stuff that people in Los Angeles throw away.
They recycle here, resell, because everyone is in a state
of developing something here. It's a pioneer country,
where the garbage-- You take it to the garbage dump
yourself, so there's no garbage day as such where you go
along the road and pick up stuff people throw away.
There's no such thing as that. At the garbage dump, you're
not allowed to rumble through the trash to get to refurbish
things and whatnot, so found objects are hard to come by
here unless you buy it. I have bought most of the objects
that I've used for the work I've done so far. I'm working
on a piece of--
I have two and a half acres here, incidentally, that
165
I'm living on, and I have plans to develop the whole two
and a half acres into a large art piece. I've begun to do
that already, just kind of shaping it up. But now I have a
pretty good idea of what two and a half acres are. It's
big, I tell you, when you're thinking about spreading it
all with art. I already have a f if teen-by- five- feet piece
of sculpture complete on one end of the lot.
MASON: What's the name of that?
PURIFOY: I haven't given it a name yet. It will probably
end up being named Tinker Toy, because I got bells that
tinkle all the time in the wind. I'm not sure. But
anyhow, it's a Mondrianic-ef feet-type thing that I made,
separate pieces of sculpture to sit inside of. It's a
walk-through, kind of an environment thing, like I've
enjoyed doing, for the most part. Flat things are kind of
out for me here. However, I do them just to take up the
time, because I have to work on three or four things at
once in order to make anything go.
MASON: Like some of the pieces that you have here in this
living room are pieces that you just did to take up time,
or--?
PURIFOY: All this stuff I did last year and the year
before. All the stuff you see hanging here I did either on
Arlington or at La Brea. The new stuff is all out in the
studio, and I've only got two pieces out there. One's
166
finished. It's a protest piece, incidentally. The Hanging
Tree it's called. I'll show it to you when we go back out.
MASON: Okay. Could you describe it?
PURIFOY: The Hanging Tree? Well, it's kind of a pun, like
I said earlier. If it had a second title, it would say,
"He was merely a boy and guite harmless, and he was also a
clown. Can't you see that? Did you have to kill him after
all?" That would be the title if it were not The Hanging
Tree. So the description of what I just said was that it
looks like a figure--male f igure--hanging from the tree,
but he's got on multicolored pants, multicolored jacket,
and the color all around him is high color. It's a
delightful piece to look at. If you didn't know that that
was the title, it would be guite a pleasant hanging.
That's the piece that's already finished. I'm working
on another piece that may have a title by the time it's
finished, but I don't know what it will be. And in
addition to that-- See, I have to do several things at
once. In addition to that, I'm working on a big piece of
sculpture eight feet tall by eight feet long, different
from anything I've ever done. That's that white piece that
I'm working on with the curlicues and whatnot.
MASON: Could you describe that, the material and how it
was different from the other things.
PURIFOY: It's a combination of found objects, canvas.
167
paint, and wood. I found an old bentwood chair on the
premises when I first came here, a rattan- type bentwood
chair. It had been in the sun for years on end. I'd seen
it here. It occurred to me that that could be a piece of
sculpture. So I stripped it down and started using pieces,
and it began to formulate this shape. I can hardly
describe it because it's different from anything I've ever
done before. It's purely organic, with shapes moving in
and out, having all the characteristics of a piece of
sculpture, and yet it could be a painting as well, because
it's a combination of canvas, wood, metal, and paint.
I'm nearly finished with it, or half finished with it,
or two-thirds finished with it. But in order not to mess
it up--that is, overwork it--I have to be doing two or
three other things at the same time, so that when I get it
to a certain place where I'm delighted with the last thing
I did, I have to let it set for a day or two and sense
whether or not if I did this or that next or if it occurred
to me to do thus and so as the next thing to do-- So
invariably it will strike me as something to do, but if I
don't let that something that strikes me to do gel, it will
be the wrong thing. Therefore, I'd mess it up. So in
order to safeguard myself from messing up things, which
every artist is capable of doing, I have a tendency to work
on several other pieces, minor pieces. Nothing fantastic.
168
just a minor idea. Not a major idea. It's no big
masterpiece, it's just a minor idea. Two or three of
them.
Now, since I work so fast, even though I have all the
time in the world out here in the desert, I also do
gardening in the interim. I plant cactus and desert
plants. I have built awnings around the place to create
shade. You have to water the trees and whatnot. So I stay
busy from morning till night here. And it's a rather
pleasant place to live forever at.
MASON: So fundamentally, I guess, how would you say your
work that you've done here is different from the flat work
that you have hanging in your living room that you said was
done on Arlington, in terms of--? Well, you've talked a
little before about how there's a kind of tension in your
work between pieces that you want to do for yourself and
pieces that you want to do for a market .
PURIFOY: Yeah, I did mention a split that I consciously
designed, so to speak, or implemented or acted out, as the
case might be. Previously when I was doing art, I'd have a
tendency to do something that pleased me with no intention
of pleasing the public. Then I would do something that I
know is pleasing to the public, and in that way I am trying
to be practical in that I know that this piece will sell
and this one may not.
169
MASON: I'm trying to understand how that works for you.
For example, here, would you say that you made any of these
pieces to sell, or were they all works that you wanted to
do?
PURIFOY: There are no examples here of what I'm talking
about. However, the piece of sculpture outside, the large
piece that's in the studio that I'm working on now, I can't
imagine that piece in somebody's house. So that kind of
piece I would make to show. Now, those little pieces that
I'm making in order to take up the time while I'm not doing
anything else, I would be making to sell if I were in a
community where people would make this distinction.
MASON: So it has to do with scale, then?
PURIFOY: No. It has nothing to do with scale so much as
it has to do with quality. Whether it fits over Mrs.
Jones ' s mantelpiece or not or headboard or not or it goes
in her kitchen or not or in her hallway or not. I have a
sensing (since I'm also a student of interior design) of
what Mrs. Jones wants. So maybe that's why I was
successful with selling things my last stint in art,
because I had a sensing about what goes in the house, what
goes with the couch, and what goes in the dining room, etc.
MASON: Does that have to do with color or--?
PURIFOY: Oftentimes color, yeah, and something that's more
or less compromising, I'd say, pleasant to look at, with no
170
political or social overtones whatsoever. [laughter] The
average person who buys stuff doesn't want to be reminded
of the problems of the world in their setting at home. I
can't much blame them, of course. Life has taught me the
difference between the kind of art that carries a social
message and the kind that doesn't. In fact, I'd prefer to
do pure design. Pure design sells better than protest, for
sure, but pure design often doesn't outsell the portrait or
picture that looks like somebody I know. Having been
working in interiors for a few years, I have a keen sense
about what goes with a house and what does not . A
collector wouldn't have to think of this, however. He
wouldn't have to think about the color of his sofa and
whatnot, but Mrs. Jones does, who's redoing her house at
$10,000 to $100,000 a throw. If she's doing her living
room and she plans to spend $50,000, I don't think she'd go
for the protest piece to put on her wall. That's the
point. So as a consequence of my knowledge of people's
tastes, I developed this split where I do things to sell
and I do other things to show, if that answers your
question.
MASON: So take this piece, for example. What's the name
of this piece with the sun?
PURIFOY: That has no name. That's untitled.
MASON: How would this piece be different from something
171
that you would make to sell?
PURIFOY: Well, first, this is a big piece. This piece is
eight feet by four feet, and the couch is six feet long and
four feet deep. I mean, three feet deep or twenty-six
inches deep, etc. So this wouldn't go with the couch--it
would extend over the end. And Mrs. Jones does not want a
picture to extend over the end of her couch, because she
wants to emphasize the couch, not the picture. So that's
eight feet, and Mrs. Jones wouldn't put an eight-foot sofa
on one wall. She'd turn the corner with it. Pictures
don't turn the corner. I'm saying this with tongue in
cheek. [laughter] And Mrs. Jones may have an eight-foot
sofa, too, on one wall, without it turning the corner,
because she can well afford it. But I don't think she'd
hang this picture over that couch. I think she'd come
closer to hanging a thinner one that--
MASON: Maybe like this one.
PURIFOY: Well, it could be eight feet long, but it most
certainly wouldn't be four feet wide. It would be more
spindly, like twenty-six inches by seventy-two, or eighty-
four or ninety-six. Size and all makes a difference.
However, people are more inclined to buy oil paintings on
canvas than collages or assemblages. You'd have to have a
unique house to buy an assemblage in the first place. If
Mrs. Jones is so inclined to put one in her house because
172
she wants a conversation piece, she comes to me. I seldom
use canvas. I use mostly wood, I paint on wood. I'm just
trying to describe what's most likely to sell in this day
and time and what is likely not to sell in this day and
time. As an artist I'm well aware of that, and I paint
with it in mind. No matter how superficial I may sound,
that's what I do, because survival comes first and survival
transcends superficiality any day.
MASON: All right. Is there anything else you want to add?
PURIFOY: No. I think we've done well.
173
INDEX
"Aesthetic Eye, The," 63,
64
Alabama State Teachers
College, 9, 10-12
Altoon, John, 33
American Cement
Corporation, 79
Andrews, Benny, 106
Angelus Furniture
Warehouse, 35
Anthony, Frank, 76
"Arts and the Poor, " 71-74
Atlanta University, 17-19,
27
Barrel and Plow, 84-85, 118
Beige, Black, and Tan, 162
Black Emergency Cultural
Coalition, 118
Black Muslims, 68
Bloom, Katherine, 72
Blum, Irving, 35-36
Bonnie, Mary, 161
Braque, Georges, 76, 105
Breath of Fresh Air, 79-80
Brewer, Debbie, 59, 60, 75,
88, 90-91, 161, 163
Broadway department store
(Los Angeles), 36-37, 38
Brockman Gallery ( Los
Angeles), 47, 48-54, 113
Brown, Edmund G. "Jerry,"
Jr., 127
Burial Ground, 119
California Afro-American
Museum (Los Angeles), 20,
81, 157
California Arts Council,
60, 100, 123, 127-36,
139, 145, 160
California State
University, Los Angeles,
71
Cannel and Schaffen
Interior Designs ( Los
Angeles), 33-34
Casey, Bernie, 106
Central City Community
Mental Health Facility
(Los Angeles), 97, 124-
27, 138
Chouinard, Nelbert, 29, 30
Chouinard Art Institute
(Los Angeles), 8, 29-33,
36, 77
Committee to Save Simon
Rodia ' s Towers in Watts,
38, 58, 60, 68
Communicative Arts Academy
(Compton, California),
138-39
Company Theater (Beverly
Hills, California), 102-3
"Contemporary Black Artists
of America, " 116
Contemporary Crafts ( Los
Angeles), 104, 113
Coyote, Peter, 127
Cuyahoga County Department
of Social Services, 27
Davis, Alonzo, 52, 99, 107,
113-14
Davis, Dale, 99
Doty, Robert M. , 21
Douglas Aircraft Company,
33
Drinkwater, Harry, 41
Duchamp, Marcel, 78, 84
Echelman, Eve, 38, 58-59,
60, 61
Extreme Object D-E-D, 52
Father Divine, 25, 110
Ferus Gallery ( Los
Angeles), 35, 44
Freud, Sigmund, 20, 111,
112, 121
Gallery at the Old Masonic
Lodge (Los Angeles), 161-
62
174
Gallery of Modern Art
(Washington, D.C.), 89,
146
Gallery 32 (Los Angeles),
113
Getty, J. Paul, Trust, 136
Hammond, David, 118, 119
Hanging Tree, The, 167
Heidegger, Martin, 19, 22
Hopps, Walter, 89
Husserl, Edmund, 19, 22
Immaculate Heart College,
93, 123
Improv Theater ( Los
Angeles), 102-3
Irwin, Robert, 33
Jackson, Suzanne, 113, 115,
118
James, William, 22
Jaquette, Tommy, 114, 143
Joined for the Arts, 74-75,
79
Jung, Carl, 21-22, 37, 112
Junk magazine, 79, 80-81,
88-89
Karamu House (Cleveland),
99-100, 140, 142
Kent, Steve, 101-2, 147
Kienholz, Edward, 44-45,
46, 47, 48
King, Martin Luther, Jr.,
23-24
Krasne, Lucille, 59, 60,
138
Lewis, Samella, 104, 106,
113, 116
Los Angeles Unified School
District Board of
Education, 100
Los Angeles County
Hospital, 28-29
Los Angeles County Museum
of Art, 21, 44, 116
Malcolm X, 118, 119
Mann, David, 85
Markham Junior High School
(Los Angeles), 70, 75, 82
Max Untitled, 83
McCone, John A., 68
Museum of African American
Art (Los Angeles), 104
National Endowment for the
Arts, 64-65, 71
National Youth
Administration, 11
Neufeldt, Max, 75, 84, 97
Nevelson, Louise, 46
Niggers Ain't Never Ever
Gonna Be Nothin'--All
They Want To Do Is Drink
->- Fuck, 47-54, 113
"19 Sixties: A Cultural
Awakening Re-evaluated,
1965-1975," 20, 21
Noriega, Ann, 149, 158
Outterbridge, John, 59, 99,
106, 143, 144, 158
Pajaud, William, 29
"Panorama of Black Artists,
A," 116
Peck, Gregory, 82
Peterson, Susan, 30, 31,
32-33
Phoenix, 83
Picasso, Pablo, 76, 105
Powell, Judson, 58, 60, 61,
62, 74, 82, 83, 85, 88,
91, 138-39, 143
Purifoy, Clarence
(brother), 5, 7-8
Purifoy, Esther (sister),
3-4
Purifoy, George (father),
1-2, 5-6
Purifoy, Georgia Mims
(mother), 1-8, 17-18
Purifoy, Mary (sister), 3
Purifoy, Ophelia (sister),
11
Purifoy, Rose (sister), 3
175
Rainey, Ma, 7
Robinson, Dorsey, 159
Rockefeller Foundation, 136
Rodia, Simon, 61
Saar, Betye, 106
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 22
Saturensky, Ruth, 84, 97
Saulter, Leon, 76
Secunda, Arthur, 75, 83, 97
Silverman, Ronald H., 63,
64-65, 71
Sink, The, 85-86, 88
Sir Watts, 80-81
Six Birds, 20, 21
"66 Signs of Neon," 43, 68,
74, 75, 79, 82, 90-91,
92-93, 96, 101, 103, 104,
116, 138, 146, 159
Smith, Bessie, 7
Smith, Eloise, 94-95, 127
Smith, John, 36, 56
Smith, Page, 94-95, 127
Snyder, Gary, 127-28
Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee,
68
Studio Watts, 142
Sudden Encounter, 84
Tann, Curtis, 100, 115
Tar and Feathers, 117, 119
Testie, Lillian, 91
Thompson, Beatrice, 112
Tinker Toy, 166
United States Navy, 13-15,
17
United States Office of
Information, 46, 81
University of California,
Berkeley, 90
University of California,
Davis, 93
University of California,
Los Angeles, 93, 94, 101
University of California,
Santa Cruz, 93-96, 109,
112, 123, 127, 159
Voulkos, Peter, 30-31
Wagner, Gordon, 75, 76, 97
Washington, Booker T. , 9
Watts, 115, 139, 145, 147
Watts riots, 64-68, 92, 96,
115, 145
Watts Summer Festival, 74,
98-101, 114-16, 142
Watts Towers, 58, 60
Watts Towers Arts Center,
59-64, 65-66, 69-71, 87,
95, 102, 113, 138, 141,
143
Watts Towers Committee, 38,
58, 60, 68
Watts Towers Music and Arts
Festival, 143
Weddolf, Joyce, 103
Welch, Sue, 58, 61, 62, 74,
138
Westminster Neighborhood
Association, 140, 141,
142
Whitney Museum of American
Art, 21, 116
Will Rogers State Historic
Park (Los Angeles), 115,
143, 144
Wilson, William, 52-53
Woodruff, Hale, 17
Works Progress
Administration, 5-6
World Black and African
Festival of Arts and
Culture (FESTAC), 148-56,
158
176
Live Music
Archive
Librivox
Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland
Museum of Art
Internet
Arcade
Console Living Room
Open Library
American
Libraries
TV News
Understanding
9/11